Sixth and seventh class were together in the school. Sixth class used to do algebra, working with polynomials in x. Seventh class, for those who would not go on to secondary school, did geometry and proved theorems. There was one student in that class who got full marks in all subjects in the primary certificate. It was quite competitive there.

... had a unique way of teaching mathematics, especially mental arithmetic, which involved solving problems without pen and paper. I found, then and ever since, that once one managed to firmly embed a mathematical idea or problem in the mind, it was effortlessly carried out and insight gradually appeared.

It was quite difficult for my mother to manage six children, be a full-time teacher, and manage a boys' school.

Every summer, Seán and his siblings would help their mother maintain the school building, formerly an old fever hospital. Painting the school was an annual task, and this hands-on involvement taught the importance of community effort from a young age.

I'm not precisely sure when I became interested in mathematics but by the time I was twelve I was interested. The fact that I found mathematics honest and easy helped.

... was best with strong pupils, and he ranked Seán as his best ever. He did much for the mathematical community, and was a stalwart of the Irish Mathematics Teachers' Association and the Computers in Education Society of Ireland. For many years he produced solution-books for the Leaving Certificate Mathematics papers, published by Folens for the use of teachers.

Seán came to Cistercian College Roscrea for the 1959-61 Leaving Certificate cycle from St Mary's College, Clonakilty, the first boys' secondary school there which had been established by his father and mother in 1938. Quietly spoken, he made an immediate impact in the classroom where he gained the deserved respect from his Inter Cert prize winning colleagues, and where he excelled at Mathematics under Fr Emmanuel's vigilant tutelage. He also made his presence felt on the top pitch where his native Cork's hurling skills guaranteed him a permanent position on the Senior Cup team. Sean's clean sweep of Honours in his Leaving Certificate included Commerce - despite never being in the Commerce class!

Paddy Kennedy was memorable because of the performance of his lectures. He required that we all wear undergraduate gowns at lectures. I think he was the only academic in UCC who insisted on that. We put on the gowns in the lecture hall before he arrived and took them off again as soon as he departed as we were embarrassed to wear them on the campus. ... Kennedy was a chain smoker and lit one cigarette from the butt of the one that was just smoked. ... However, the really memorable aspect of his lecturing was his presentation. I still have the notes I took in his course and they are a clear, organised presentation of the introduction to the abstract algebra course. As he lectured, he gave the impression that he was just thinking up the material as he went along; he would stand back, look at the blackboard and reflect for a minute or two and then go and fill the board with his beautiful writing and crystal clear material. He was by far the best lecturer I ever had.

They were great books, and still are, but I had no preparation for that level and I struggled with those books all year.

In discussing tensor products, bilinear mappings and linear mappings on a Banach space it has been found useful to distinguish between various sorts of mappings such as the compact, nuclear, integral mappings, etc. Since n-homogeneous polynomials are nothing more than symmetric n-linear mappings, and a holomorphic function on a Banach space can be looked upon as a sequence of homogeneous polynomials which satisfy certain conditions, it is not surprising that one can define various subspaces of the space of all holomorphic functions so that the resulting structure is enriched. Such is the case in the L Nachbin and C Gupta paper "On Malgrange's theorem for nuclearly entire functions", where Malgrange's approximation theorem is generalised from the finite to the infinite-dimensional case. To describe a theory for a large class of subspaces Nachbin, in "Topology on spaces of holomorphic mappings", introduced the concept of holomorphy type. Motivated by these two papers, we describe and study in this work various topological vector spaces of holomorphic functions.

The results in this paper are taken from my doctoral thesis at the University of Maryland, 1969. I wish to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Leopoldo Nachbin, for introducing me to this subject and for his constant encouragement and guidance at all times. I also wish to thank Professor John Horvath for his advice and encouragement. I wrote my thesis while on leave of absence from the University of Maryland at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, Rio de Janeiro. During that time I was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas of Brazil and the National University of Ireland.

There were no positions in Ireland. Then I applied for a scholarship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS), which I got. So I was there for two years, 1970-1972. In the middle of my first year a job came up in University College Dublin (UCD), which I applied for. The problem was that DIAS wanted a decision for my second year sooner than UCD could confirm the position, so I said to UCD that I had to take the DIAS post for another year. UCD agreed to take my application as if it were for the following year, so I spent another year (my second) at DIAS and then I got the UCD position which I took. I have been there ever since.

Seán became a professor in 1979 and held the Chair in Analysis. The story of his appointment is a colourful one, which he told at his retirement. Suffice to say, the rule 'no canvassing' came shortly afterwards! Seán recalled, "The whole process took 3 months, every day going to see people, making a lot of phone calls, and at the same time teaching." He even remembered trying to explain his research to a veterinary professor who was giving a horse an injection at the time!

The Texture of West Cork is a profile of the community that is West Cork. Examples and anecdotes involving communication, cooperation, sport, the performing arts, the environment, economics and politics explore what is unique and attractive about this remote part of Ireland. The conclusions are not a surprise but rarely presented in such a lucid and unified fashion.

When Sean took time out from his academic pursuits, he was a keen family man, closely followed Munster Rugby (of course!), was the lynchpin of the local residents' association (Lakelands in Stillorgan), and a chronicler of local history and events. He zealously maintained his close links with West Cork - where he was buried ... He was a most enthusiastic supporter of all Cistercian College Roscrea Class of '61 events - even shrugging aside his medical ailments last September (2023) in order to attend a lunch in Dublin.

While Seán was renowned for his mathematics across the world, any chat with mathematicians who had visited here inevitably steered towards stories of his driving, or his smoking, or his smoking while driving. He was unfailingly generous though in driving his increasingly apprehensive mathematical visitors to and from the airport. Indeed one who came for his funeral mentioned that Seán had collected and dropped him back to the airport on something like 17 visits. Seán had a flexible interpretation of most rules of the road (including one-way road signs) and considered several feet out from the footpath a perfectly good place to park. One former student wrote on his passing that "Seán encouraged and supported my PhD work with wit, deep insight, and friendship. He even loaned me his car on one occasion, my first ever attempt to drive on the left side of the road (it was not entirely disastrous). I recall his advice to me about it: you only need to watch out for what is in front of you. You'll be to the front of other drivers who are behind you or to your side, so no need to worry about them! Logical, a bit irreverent, and a reminder to not take things too seriously. That was just like him."