Michael Roberts (18 April 1817 – 4 October 1882), was an Irish mathematician and academic of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), who served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics there 1862-1879.
Roberts was born into a well-established landed gentry family in County Cork, whose ancestors had settled there from Kent about 1630.
His mother was of Scottish origins, descended from the Colonel Stewart who was governor of Edinburgh Castle and took part in the Jacobite rising of 1715.
[2] Roberts discovered many properties of geodesic lines and lines of curvature on the ellipsoid, especially in relation to umbilics, and from 1845 published papers in the Journal de Mathématiques, the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques.
The International Exhibition of 1851 at Hyde Park displayed a small model ellipsoid, on which the lines of curvature had been traced according to a method Roberts invented.