Henri Poincaré

Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912).
Born	(1854-04-29)29 April 1854 Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France
Died	17 July 1912(1912-07-17) (aged 58) Paris, France
Other names	Jules Henri Poincaré
Residence	France
Nationality	French
Fields	Mathematics and physics
Institutions	Corps des Mines Caen University La Sorbonne Bureau des Longitudes
Education	Lycée Nancy (now Lycée Poincaré ())
Alma mater	École Polytechnique École des Mines University of Paris (Dr, 1879)
Thesis	Sur les propriétés des fonctions définies par les équations différences (1879)
Doctoral advisor	Charles Hermite
Doctoral students	Louis Bachelier Jean Bosler Dimitrie Pompeiu Mihailo Petrović
Other notable students	Tobias Dantzig Théophile de Donder
Known for	Poincaré conjecture Three-body problem Topology Special relativity Poincaré–Hopf theorem Poincaré duality Poincaré–Birkhoff–Witt theorem Poincaré inequality Hilbert–Poincaré series Poincaré metric Rotation number Coining term 'Betti number' Bifurcation theory Chaos theory Brouwer fixed-point theorem Sphere-world Poincaré–Bendixson theorem Poincaré–Lindstedt method Poincaré recurrence theorem
Influences	Lazarus Fuchs Immanuel Kant
Influenced	Louis Rougier George David Birkhoff Cubism
Notable awards	RAS Gold Medal (1900) Sylvester Medal (1901) Matteucci Medal (1905) Bolyai Prize (1905) Bruce Medal (1911)
Signature
Notes
He was an uncle of Pierre Boutroux.

Jules Henri Poincaré (French: [ʒyl ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe]; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. 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 to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. 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. 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 also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.

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. 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. In 1905, Poincaré first proposed gravitational waves (ondes gravifiques) emanating from a body and propagating at the speed of light as being required by the Lorentz transformations.