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Early Life and Achievements
Jules Henri Poincare was born in Lorraine, France to parents whose lineage was of great notoriety and nobility. It seems that the great minds from which he came formed a brilliant one in himself. As a student, he consistently excelled and has many great achievements for which he is accredited. Poincare "can be said to have been the originator of algebraic topology and of the theory of analytic functions of several complex variable." (O'Connor) -
Scholarly Advancements
Henri Poincaré was “one of the top students in every topic he studied” and was a “Monster of Mathematics” (O’Connor) during his eleven years of attendance at the Lycée in Nancy, France. In 1870, he took a brief lapse in schooling while he served alongside his father in the Franco-Prussian war, tending to the wounded soldiers and learning German (Henri Poincaré). -
Scholarly Advancements (cont'd.)
He continued his studies, entering the mathematical field at the École Polytechnique and studied under Charles Hermite. There he published his first paper and graduated in 1875. Poincare continued his education at the École des Mines and was a mining engineer while attending to his doctoral work. He then earned himself a mathematical doctorate under the supervision of Hermite in the field of differential equations from the University of Paris in 1879 (O’Connor). -
Scholarly Advancements (cont'd)
While Poincare never fully relinquished his career within the Mining community, he lived out the rest of his career teaching at the University of Paris and held the chairs of Physical and Experimental Mechanics, Mathematical Physics and Theory of Probability, and Celestial Mechanics of Astronomy. (Henri Poincaré) -
The Last Polymath
Henri Poincare won a mathematical competition for a resolution of the three-body problem concerning the free motion of multiple orbiting bodies. (Henri Poincare) This issue involving two orbiting bodies in the Solar System was a mystery to some of the greatest mathematicians since the time of Isaac Newton. Poincaré summarized his new mathematical methods in astronomy in Les Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste, 3 vol. (1892, 1893, 1899; “The New Methods of Celestial Mechanics”). -
The Last Polymath (cont'd)
“Henri Poincaré was the first to introduce four-vectors, the Lorentz group and its invariants (including the space-time metric), “Poincaré stresses,” as well as making other valuable contributions to relativity theory.” (Heinzmann) His contributions to geometry and philosophy have shaped the general analysis of scientific theories. (Murzi) -
Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy
Henri Poincare “argued for conventionalism and against both formalism and logicism.” (Murzi). He was considered and anti-Platonist and “according to Poincaré, mathematics requires intuition, interpreted as an element of understanding, not only in the context of discovery, but equally in the context of justification.” (Heinzmann) He believed that “arithmetic is a synthetic science whose objects are not independent from human thought.” (Murzi)
