Jules Henri Poincaré (April 29, 1854 – July 17, 1912) (IPA: [http://www.bartleby.com/61/wavs/3/P0400300.wav Poincaré pronunciation example at Bartlby.com ), generally known as Henri Poincaré, was one of France's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and a philosopher of science. Poincaré is often described as the last "universalist" (after Gauss) capable of understanding and contributing in virtually all parts of mathematics.
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, one of the most famous problems in mathematics. 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.
Poincaré introduced the modern principle of relativity and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. The Poincaré group was named after him. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Lorentz in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, the final step in the discovery of the theory of special relativity.
In 1862 Henri entered the Lycée in Nancy (now renamed the Lycée Henri Poincaré in his honour, along with the University of Nancy). He spent eleven years at the Lycée and during this time he proved to be one of the top students in every topic he studied. His mathematics teacher described him as a "monster of mathematics" and he won first prizes in the concours général, a competition between the top pupils from all the Lycées across France. (His poorest subjects were music and physical education, where he was described as "average at best" (O'Connor et al., 2002). However, poor eyesight and a tendency towards absentmindedness may explain these difficulties (Carl, 1968). He graduated from the Lycée in 1871 with a bachelors degree in letters and sciences.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 he served alongside his father in the Ambulance Corps.
Poincaré entered the École Polytechnique in 1873. There he studied mathematics as a student of Charles Hermite, continuing to excel and publishing his first paper (Démonstration nouvelle des propriétés de l'indicatrice d'une surface) in 1874. He graduated in 1875 or 1876. He went on to study at the École des Mines, continuing to study mathematics in addition to the mining engineering syllabus and received the degree of ordinary engineer in March 1879.
As a graduate of the École des Mines he joined the Corps des Mines as an inspector for the Vesoul region in northeast France. He was on the scene of a mining disaster at Magny in August 1879 in which 18 miners died. He carried out the official investigation into the accident in a characteristically thorough and humane way.
At the same time, Poincaré was preparing for his doctorate in sciences in mathematics under the supervision of Charles Hermite. His doctoral thesis was in the field of differential equations. Poincaré devised a new way of studying the properties of these functions. He not only faced the question of determining the integral of such equations, but also was the first person to study their general geometric properties. He realised that they could be used to model the behaviour of multiple bodies in free motion within the solar system. Poincaré graduated from the University of Paris in 1879.
Beginning in 1881 and for the rest of his career, he taught at the University of Paris, (the Sorbonne). He was initially appointed as the maître de conférences d'analyse (associate professor of analysis) (Sageret, 1911). Eventually, he held the chairs of Physical and Experimental Mechanics, Mathematical Physics and Theory of Probability, and Celestial Mechanics and Astronomy.
Also in that same year, Poincaré married Miss Poulain d'Andecy. Together they had four children: Jeanne (born 1887), Yvonne (born 1889), Henriette (born 1891), and Léon (born 1893).
In 1887, at the young age of 32, Poincaré was elected to the French Academy of Sciences. He became its president in 1906, and was elected to the Académie française in 1909.
In 1887 he won Oscar II, King of Sweden's mathematical competition for a resolution of the three-body problem concerning the free motion of multiple orbiting bodies. (See Three Body Problem section below)
In 1893 Poincaré joined the French Bureau des Longitudes, which engaged him in the synchronization of time around the world. In 1897 Poincaré backed an unsuccessful proposal for the decimalization of circular measure, and hence time and longitude. (see Galison 2003) It was this post which led him to consider the question of establishing international time zones and the synchronization of time between bodies in relative motion. (See Relativity section below)
In 1899, and again more successfully in 1904, he intervened in the trials of Alfred Dreyfus. He attacked the spurious scientific claims of some of the evidence brought against Dreyfus, who was a Jewish officer in the French army charged with treason by anti-Semitic colleagues.
In 1912 Poincaré underwent surgery for a prostate problem and subsequently died from an embolism on July 17, 1912, aged 58. He is buried in the Poincaré family vault in the Cemetery of Montparnasse, Paris.
The French Minister of Education, Claude Allegre, has recently (2004) proposed that Poincaré be reburied in the Pantheon in Paris, which is reserved for French citizens only of the highest honor. *
He was also a popularizer of mathematics and physics and wrote several books for the lay public.
Among the specific topics he contributed to are the following:
Weierstrass did not know how accurate he was. In Poincaré's paper, he described new mathematical ideas such as homoclinic points. The memoir was about to be published in Acta Mathematica when an error was found by the editor. This error in fact led to further discoveries by Poincaré, which are now considered to be the beginning of Chaos theory. The memoir was published later in 1890.
His research into orbits about Lagrange points and low‐energy transfers was not utilised for more than a century afterwards. See Interplanetary Transport Network.
Poincaré's work on establishing international time zones, led him to consider how clocks at rest on the Earth, which would be moving at different speeds relative to absolute space (or the "luminiferous aether") could be synchronized. At the same time Dutch theorist Hendrik Lorentz was developing Maxwell's theory into a theory of the motion of charged particles ("electrons" or "ions"), and their interaction with radiation. He had introduced the concept of local time
Thereafter, Poincaré was a constant interpreter (and sometimes friendly critic) of Lorentz's theory. Poincaré as a philosopher, was interested in the ”deeper meaning”. Thus he interpreted Lorentz's theory in terms the Principle of relativity and in so doing he came up with many insights that are now associated with Special relativity.
In the paper of 1900 Poincaré discussed the recoil of a physical object when it emits a burst of radiation in one direction, as predicted by Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics. He remarked that the stream of radiation appeared to act like a "fictitious fluid" with a mass per unit volume of e/c2, where e is the energy density; in other words, the equivalent mass of the radiation is . Poincaré considered the recoil of the emiiter to be an unresolved feature of Maxwell-Lorentz theory, which he discussed again in "Science and Hypothesis" (1902) and "The Value of Science" (1904). In the latter he said the recoil "is contrary to the principle of Newton since our projectile here has no mass, it is not matter, it is energy", and discussed two other unexplained effects: (1) non-conservation of mass implied by Lorentz's variable mass , Abraham's theory of variable mass and Kaufmann's experiments on the mass of fast moving electrons and (2) the non-conservation of energy in the radium experiments of Madame Curie. It was Einstein's insight that a body losing energy as radiation or heat was losing mass of amount , and the corresponding mass-energy conservation law, which resolved these problems.
In 1905 Poincaré wrote to Lorentz about Lorentz's paper of 1904, which Poincaré described as a "paper of supreme importance." In this letter he pointed out an error Lorentz had made when he had applied his transformation to one of Maxwell's equations, that for charge-occupied space, and also questioned the time dilation factor given by Lorentz. In a second letter to Lorentz[http://web.archive.org/web/20050224225216/http://www.univ-nancy2.fr/poincare/chp/text/lorentz4.html, Poincaré explained the group property of the transformations, which Lorentz had not noticed, and gave his own reason why Lorentz's time dilation factor was indeed correct: Lorentz’s factor was necessary to make the Lorentz transformation form a group. In the letter, he also gave Lorentz what is now known as the relativistic velocity-addition law, which is necessary to demonstrate invariance. Poincaré later delivered a paper at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris on 5 June 1905 in which these issues were addressed. In the published version of that short paper he wrote
In an enlarged version of the paper that did not appear until 1906, he published his group property proof, incorporating the velocity addition law that he had previously written to Lorentz. The paper contains many other deductions from, and applications of, the transformations. For example, Poincaré (1906) pointed out that the combination is invariant, and he introduced the 4-vector notation that Hermann Minkowski became known for.
Einstein's first paper on relativity derived the Lorentz transformation and presented them in the same form as had Poincaré. It was published three months after Poincaré's short paper, but before Poincaré's longer version appeared. Although Einstein (1905) relied on the Principle of relativity and used the same clock synchronization procedure that Poincaré (1900) had described, his paper was remarkable in that it had no references at all.
Poincaré never acknowledged Einstein's work on Special Relativity, but Einstein acknowledged Poincaré's in the text of a lecture in 1921 called Geometrie und Erfahrung. Later Einstein commented on Poincaré as being one of the pioneers of relativity:
Poincaré's work in the development of Special Relativity is well recognized (e.g. Darrigol 2004), though most historians stress that despite many similarities with Einstein's work, the two had very different research agendas and interpretations of the work (see Galison 2003 and Kragh 1999). A minority go much further, such as the historian of science Sir Edmund Whittaker who held that Poincaré and Lorentz were the true discoverers of Relativity (Whittaker 1953). Poincaré consistently credited Lorentz's achievements, ranking his own contributions as minor. Thus, he wrote:
On the other hand, in a memoir written as a tribute to Poincaré after his death, Lorentz readily admitted the mistake he had made and credited Poincaré's achievements:
In summary, Poincaré regarded the mechanics as developed by Lorentz in order to obey the principle of relativity as the essence of the theory, while Lorentz stressed that perfect invariance was first obtained by Poincaré. The modern view is inclined to say that the group property and the invariance are the essential points.
The mathematician Darboux claimed he was un intuitif (intuitive), arguing that this is demonstrated by the fact that he worked so often by visual representation. He did not care about being rigorous and disliked logic. He believed that logic was not a way to invent but a way to structure ideas and that logic limits ideas.
However, these abilities were somewhat balanced by his shortcomings:
In addition, Toulouse stated that most mathematicians worked from principle already established while Poincaré was the type that started from basic principle each time. (O'Connor et al., 2002)
His method of thinking is well summarized as:
Habitué à négliger les détails et à ne regarder que les cimes, il passait de l'une à l'autre avec une promptitude surprenante et les faits qu'il découvrait se groupant d'eux-mêmes autour de leur centre étaient instantanément et automatiquement classés dans sa mémoire. (He neglected details and jumped from idea to idea, the facts gathered from each idea would then come together and solve the problem.) (Belliver, 1956)
He published two major works that placed celestial mechanics on a rigorous mathematical basis:
In popular writings he helped establish the fundamental popular definitions and perceptions of science by these writings:
Poincaré believed that arithmetic is a synthetic science. He argued that Peano's axioms cannot be proven non-circularly with the principle of induction (Murzi, 1998), therefore concluding that arithmetic is a priori synthetic and not analytic. Poincaré then went on to say that mathematics cannot be deduced from logic since it is not analytic. His views were the same as those of Kant (Kolak, 2001). However Poincaré did not share Kantian views in all branches of philosophy and mathematics. For example, in geometry, Poincaré believed that the structure of non-Euclidean space can be known analytically.
1854 births | 1912 deaths | 19th century mathematicians | 20th century mathematicians | French mathematicians | French physicists | Algebraic geometers | Topologists | Geometers | Mathematical analysts | Alumni of the École Polytechnique
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