French mathematician, physicist and philosopher of science often called the last universalist, the last mathematician to work across essentially the whole of the subject as it stood in his lifetime. He founded algebraic topology with his 1895 paper Analysis situs, won King Oscar II of Sweden's prize competition in 1887 for a memoir on the three body problem whose errors led him to the first description of chaotic dynamical behavior, and is credited alongside Albert Einstein and Hendrik Lorentz as an independent co-discoverer of results underlying special relativity. In 1904 he conjectured, almost as an aside at the end of a sixty five page paper, that every simply connected closed three dimensional manifold is topologically a three sphere, a problem that stood open for nearly a century until Grigori Perelman proved it in 2002 and 2003.
Facts
BirthplaceNancy, Lorraine, France 2 Nationality / Culture Defining ContributionFounded algebraic topology and, in 1904, posed the conjecture that every simply connected closed three dimensional manifold is topologically equivalent to a three dimensional sphere, later proved by Grigori Perelman. 3 Notable WorkAnalysis situs (1895); Les Methodes nouvelles de la mecanique celeste, three volumes (1892-1899) 2 AwardRoyal Astronomical Society Gold Medal (1900); Sylvester Medal (1901); Matteucci Medal (1905); Bolyai Prize (1905); Bruce Medal (1911) 1 Connections
Associated With
Source Henri Poincare (Wikipedia)
Source Phase Space (Wikipedia)
Source MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
Attributed Works
Source Bifurcation theory (Wikipedia)
Source Homeomorphism (Wikipedia)
Source Phase Space (Wikipedia)
Source Homology sphere (Wikipedia)
Conjectures Posed
Source Clay Mathematics Institute
In Branch
Mentored
Source Dimitrie Pompeiu (Wikipedia)
Source Mihailo Petrović Alas (Wikipedia)
Principal Result
Source Henri Poincare (Wikipedia)
Source Henri Poincare (Wikipedia)
Proofs Credited
In the Other Atlases
Nationality
Also in Geography Atlas: the nationality of this subject.
Sources
1. Henri Poincare (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationInfobox: birth_place
Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France
Lead section, gender reference
He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
Associated With: Dynamical Systems, Lead section
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.
Principal Result: Poincare Conjecture, Article text
Early in the 20th century he formulated the Poincaré conjecture, which became, over time, one of the famous unsolved problems in mathematics.
Principal Result: Poincare Recurrence Theorem, Article text
He famously introduced the concept of the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which states that a state will eventually return arbitrarily close to its initial state after a sufficiently long time, which has far-reaching consequences.
View the Source 2. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and Statisticshttps://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Poincare/Quote, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Poincare/
Henri Poincare can be said to have been the originator of algebraic topology and of the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables.
3. Clay Mathematics Institute
Clay Mathematics Institutehttps://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/, Poincare Conjecture section
In 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincare asked if the three dimensional sphere is characterized as the unique simply connected three manifold.
- Conjectures Posed: Poincare Conjecture, https://www.claymath.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Poincare-press-release.pdf
View the Source Phase Space (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Phase Space, Lead section, last sentence
The concept of phase space was developed in the late 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri Poincaré, and Josiah Willard Gibbs.
Attributed Works: Phase Space, Lead
The concept of phase space was developed in the late 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri Poincaré, and Josiah Willard Gibbs.
View the Source Homeomorphism (Wikipedia)
Attributed Works: Homeomorphism, LeadQuote, Attributed Works: Homeomorphism, Lead
named by Henri Poincaré
Dimitrie Pompeiu (Wikipedia)
Mentored: Dimitrie Pompeiu, BiographyQuote, Mentored: Dimitrie Pompeiu, Biography
written under the direction of Henri Poincaré
Mihailo Petrović Alas (Wikipedia)
Mentored: Mihailo Petrović Alas, Lead, teacher PoincareQuote, Mentored: Mihailo Petrović Alas, Lead, teacher Poincare
He was a student of Henri Poincaré, Paul Painlevé, Charles Hermite and Émile Picard.
Bifurcation theory (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationAttributed Works: Bifurcation Theory, Lead paragraphQuote, Attributed Works: Bifurcation Theory, Lead paragraph
The name "bifurcation" was first introduced by Henri Poincaré in 1885 in the first paper in mathematics showing such a behavior.
Homology sphere (Wikipedia)
Attributed Works: Poincare Homology Sphere, Lead sectionQuote, Attributed Works: Poincare Homology Sphere, Lead section
space) is a particular example of a homology sphere, first constructed by Henri Poincaré. Being a spherical 3-manifold, it is the only
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