Denis Weaire
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Denis L. Weaire (FRS) is an Irish physicist, based in Trinity College Dublin. Educated in Belfast and Cambridge, he has since held positions at the universities of California, Chicago, Harvard and Yale, ultimately holding professorships at Herriot-Watt, and University College Dublin before becoming, in 1984, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural Philosophy in Trinity. Together with his graduate student, Robert Phelan, Weaire came up with a counter example to Lord Kelvin's conjecture on which surface was the most economical way to divide space into cells of equal size with the least surface area. This counter-example is now referred to as the Weaire-Phelan structure. This strucure will be an integral part of the design of the aquatic centre that will be used in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
In 1971, together with Michael Thorpe, he introduced the Weaire-Thorpe model for electronic structure calculations. This has found application in the theory of amorphous insulators.
Weaire is currently carrying out research in the field of foam physics. He has co-authored The Physics of Foams, Oxford University Press (2000) with Stefan Hutzler.
In 2005 he was awarded the premier award of the Royal Irish Academy, the Cunningham Medal. Previous winners include William Rowan Hamilton.
[edit] Relationship to Ira Einhorn
During the convicted murderer Ira Einhorn's time in Ireland, Weaire was his landlord. When Weaire found out about the accusations of murder that Einhorn faced in the U.S., he reported him to the FBI and evicted him. Weaire, and his relationship to Einhorn, was the subject of the 2004 TV show, Interpol Investigates (episode entitled Fatal Compulsion). The part of 'Professor Dennis Weaire' was played by actor Robert Randolph Caton. He was previously depicted in the made for TV film The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, which featured Naomi Watts as Holly Maddux, Kevin Anderson as Einhorn, and Ian D. Clark as Weaire.
