Henri Poincaré
French Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist
May 17, 2009 Harry P. Schlanger
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912) was a mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher. He was born in the French city of Nancy, into a family of considerable ability and distinction. His father, Leon was a doctor of medicine and his cousin, Raymond Poincaré became the President of France.
Lycée Henri Poincaré
Henri attended the Lycée of Nancy, which was later renamed Lycée Henri Poincaré in his honour. He proved a top student in all topics he studied.
Elementary school for Henri was easy due to his amazing memory. He could read at incredible speed and remember much detail that he read. One particularity of Henri, however, was his lack of hand co-ordination, and he was a shocking writer. He was completely unable to draw diagrams or a graph. He also seemed to be the "absent-minded professor" type. When he was a young adult, he often forgot his meals, or whether he had had breakfast.
All his life, Henri did his maths in his head whilst pacing back and forth, often for hours: it was only written down when finally completed.
Poincaré's Education and Achievements in Science
Henri Poincaré entered the École Polytechnique in 1873 where he studied mathematics as a student of Charles Hermite. He went on to study at the École des Mines in mining engineering and mathematics. His doctoral thesis at University of Paris was in the field of differential equations.
Poincaré made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, celestial mechanics, optics, and other fields. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics.
Poincaré made other significant contributions, including:
- Chaos Theory - In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system, which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
- Contributions to Relativity - Poincaré is credited with introducing the modern principle of relativity, even before Einstein, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and these are recorded in a letter to Lorentz in 1905.
Henri Poincaré became a professor at the age of 25, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Paris at the age of 27.
Poincaré's Later Years
Poincaré was a truly humble and unaffected man who had honours showered on him in the early 1900s by all the leading societies of the world.
In his later years, Henri wrote popular books on mathematics in a simple style, which ordinary people could read. It is said that that from 1905, workmen and shopgirls could be seen in the parks and gardens of Paris reading Poincaré's cheap masterpieces.
Henri Poincaré
|
What do you think about this article?
Latest Articles