Peter Lynch is an Irish meteorologist, mathematician, blogger and book author. His interests include numerical weather prediction, dynamic meteorology, Hamiltonian mechanics, the history of meteorology, and the popularisation of mathematics.
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Life and career
Lynch was born in Dublin, and educated at University College Dublin, where he obtained his BSc (1968) and MSc (1969) in mathematical science. He enlisted in the Irish meteorological service (now known as Met Éireann) in 1971, and worked there until 2004, rising to the rank of Head of the Research and Training Division and later Deputy Director. In 1982, he was awarded a PhD by Trinity College Dublin for his thesis Planetary-scale Hydrodynamic Instability in the Atmosphere with Ray Bates as a primary supervisor and Larry Crane as a secondary supervisor. He became an honorary part-time lecturer in the School of Mathematics in Trinity College Dublin in 1990, a position he still holds in 2024.
In 2004, he moved to academia, becoming Met Éireann Professor of Meteorology at the School of Mathematical Sciences, University College Dublin. He has supervised several doctoral theses there. He is now an Emeritus Professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences.
Shortly after formally retiring from UCD in 2011, he started writing a weekly mathematical blog called "That's Maths", about half of the articles also appearing in The Irish Times newspaper. Three books of collected columns have resulted, in 2016, 2020, and 2022.