The establishment of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was due almost entirely to the efforts of one man, Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach [prime minister] of Ireland. Dev, as he was called by friend and foe, was born in New York City in 1882, so that he was five years older than schrödinger. His mother, Kate Coll, was an Irish servant girl, and his father, Vivion de Valera, a delicate Spanish artist. Eddie, their only child, was three years old when the father died, and he was brought to Ireland to be raised by his grandmother in a cottage at Bruree, County Limerick. As a schoolboy, mathematics was his best subject and he never lost his love for it.

Dev was always a devout Catholic, in fact, a daily communicant. At that time it was not easy for a Catholic to get a university degree in Ireland, since Trinity College Dublin (T.C.D.) was almost exclusively Protestant and the Royal University of Ireland gave examinations but no courses. In 1904, however, Dev received the B.A. degree from the Royal University, and the following year had his first opportunity to attend some good lectures in mathematics, given by Arthur Con way at the newly established University College Dublin (U.C.D.). From 1906 to 1908 he followed a course in mathematical physics by Edmund Whittaker, who was professor of astronomy at T.C.D. and Royal Astronomer at the Dunsink Observatory. In 1908, Dev joined the Gaelic League and began an intensive study of the Irish language, which became an intellectual love second only to mathematics. In 1910, he married his Gaelic teacher, Sinead Flanagan, and they had seven children.

In 1913 Dev became convinced that Ireland would never obtain any measure of self government without a show of force. He joined the Irish Volunteers, an underground military organization, quickly rising to commandant of one of the Dublin battalions. In the Easter Rising of 1916, his assignment was to defend the southeastern approaches to Dublin, after the principal buildings in the city center had been seized by the Irish army and the Republic proclaimed by Patrick Pearse. The organization of the rising was bungled, but in any case it was doomed to failure once British reinforcements arrived with artillery.