Difference between revisions of "Henri Poincaré"

Latest revision as of 04:52, 30 March 2016

Jules Henri Poincaré (French: [ʒyl ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe]; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science.

Life

He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.

As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions:

• Pure mathematics
• Applied mathematics
• Mathematical physics
• Celestial mechanics

Poincaré conjecture

He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003.

Three-body problem

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.

Topology

He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.

Invariance of physics under transformations

Poincaré made clear the importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form.

Contributions to special relativity

Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.

Poincaré group

The Poincaré group used in physics and mathematics is named after him.

Vilification of Georg Cantor

Poincaré vilified mathematician Georg Cantor, harming Cantor's career.

See also

• Georg Cantor
• Mathematics
• Poincaré section

External links

• Henri Poincaré @ Wikipedia