Denis Weaire

Denis Lawrence Weaire FRS (born 17 October 1942) is an Irish physicist and an emeritus professor of Trinity College, Dublin.

Educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Clare College, Cambridge, he held positions at the universities of California, Chicago, Harvard and Yale, ultimately holding professorships at Heriot-Watt, and University College Dublin before becoming, in 1984, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College.

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 structure was an integral part of the design of the aquatic centre 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.

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