Madam, - I was bemused by the description of Eamon de Valera as a "maths bore" (August 18th), since his professional life as a mathematics teacher was anything but boring, and his championing of mathematics and science in later years had global consequences which can be said to have helped to create the world we know today.
When de Valera "drove civil servants to distraction during long train journeys", he was more than likely discussing the astonishing insights of Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, and other "maths bores" who changed the course of history.
De Valera went on to deploy the resources of the Irish State to rescue Schrödinger from Nazi-occupied Europe and he seized this opportunity to establish the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, with Schrödinger as first director of the institute's school of theoretical physics.
De Valera's justification to Seanad Éireann for persisting with such a venture after the outbreak of the second World War was:
"The only thing extraordinary about this Bill is the time at which I happen to be bringing it in. . . even if we look at it merely from the point of view of a gesture, if you like, to indicate that there is a better way than war for advancing the welfare of mankind, it may not be altogether inappropriate".
Three years later, Schrödinger chose to deliver a lecture in Dublin which he must have known would be incendiary in the Ireland of that day, and Time magazine reported that de Valera brought the members of his Cabinet to sit in the front row. Schrödinger's lecture, "What is Life?", proposed that genetics could be understood as a code - what we now call DNA - and many (including Nobel laureates Crick and Watson of "Double Helix" fame) credit his ideas with helping to trigger the current revolution in biology.
Eamon De Valera may not have been a truly great Irish mathematician like Hamilton, Synge, Fitzgerald or Bell, but he was no bore either. - Yours, etc,
LEO ENRIGHT, Temple Bar, Dublin 2.