Henri Poincaré

Henri Poincaré (born April 29, 1854, Nancy, France—died July 17, 1912, Paris) was a French mathematician, one of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical physicists at the end of 19th century. He made a series of profound innovations in geometry, the theory of differential equations, electromagnetism, topology, and the philosophy of mathematics.

Poincaré grew up in Nancy and studied mathematics from 1873 to 1875 at the École Polytechnique in Paris. He continued his studies at the Mining School in Caen before receiving his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1879. While a student, he discovered new types of complex functions that solved a wide variety of differential equations. This major work involved one of the first “mainstream” applications of non-Euclidean geometry, a subject discovered by the Hungarian János Bolyai and the Russian Nikolay Lobachevsky about 1830 but not generally accepted by mathematicians until the 1860s and ’70s. Poincaré published a long series of papers on this work in 1880–84 that effectively made his name internationally. The prominent German mathematician Felix Klein, only five years his senior, was already working in the area, and it was widely agreed that Poincaré came out the better from the comparison.

In the 1880s Poincaré also began work on curves defined by a particular type of differential equation, in which he was the first to consider the global nature of the solution curves and their possible singular points (points where the differential equation is not properly defined). He investigated such questions as: Do the solutions spiral into or away from a point? Do they, like the hyperbola, at first approach a point and then swing past and recede from it? Do some solutions form closed loops? If so, do nearby curves spiral toward or away from these closed loops? He showed that the number and types of singular points are determined purely by the topological nature of the surface. In particular, it is only on the torus that the differential equations he was considering have no singular points.

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Philosophy 101

Poincaré intended this preliminary work to lead to the study of the more complicated differential equations that describe the motion of the solar system. In 1885 an added inducement to take the next step presented itself when King Oscar II of Sweden offered a prize for anyone who could establish the stability of the solar system. This would require showing that equations of motion for the planets could be solved and the orbits of the planets shown to be curves that stay in a bounded region of space for all time. Some of the greatest mathematicians since Isaac Newton had attempted to solve this problem, and Poincaré soon realized that he could not make any headway unless he concentrated on a simpler, special case, in which two massive bodies orbit one another in circles around their common centre of gravity while a minute third body orbits them both. The third body is taken to be so small that it does not affect the orbits of the larger ones. Poincaré could establish that the orbit is stable, in the sense that the small body returns infinitely often arbitrarily close to any position it has occupied. This does not mean, however, that it does not also move very far away at times, which would have disastrous consequences for life on Earth. For this and other achievements in his essay, Poincaré was awarded the prize in 1889. But, on writing the essay for publication, Poincaré discovered that another result in it was wrong, and in putting that right he discovered that the motion could be chaotic. He had hoped to show that if the small body could be started off in such a way that it traveled in a closed orbit, then starting it off in almost the same way would result in an orbit that at least stayed close to the original orbit. Instead, he discovered that even small changes in the initial conditions could produce large, unpredictable changes in the resulting orbit. (This phenomenon is now known as pathological sensitivity to initial positions, and it is one of the characteristic signs of a chaotic system. See complexity.) 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”).

Poincaré was led by this work to contemplate mathematical spaces (now called manifolds) in which the position of a point is determined by several coordinates. Very little was known about such manifolds, and, although the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann had hinted at them a generation or more earlier, few had taken the hint. Poincaré took up the task and looked for ways in which such manifolds could be distinguished, thus opening up the whole subject of topology, then known as analysis situs. Riemann had shown that in two dimensions surfaces can be distinguished by their genus (the number of holes in the surface), and Enrico Betti in Italy and Walther von Dyck in Germany had extended this work to three dimensions, but much remained to be done. Poincaré singled out the idea of considering closed curves in the manifold that cannot be deformed into one another. For example, any curve on the surface of a sphere can be continuously shrunk to a point, but there are curves on a torus (curves wrapped around a hole, for instance) that cannot. Poincaré asked if a three-dimensional manifold in which every curve can be shrunk to a point is topologically equivalent to a three-dimensional sphere. This problem (now known as the Poincaré conjecture) became one of the most important unsolved problems in algebraic topology. Ironically, the conjecture was first proved for dimensions greater than three: in dimensions five and above by Stephen Smale in the 1960s and in dimension four as a consequence of work by Simon Donaldson and Michael Freedman in the 1980s. Finally, Grigori Perelman proved the conjecture for three dimensions in 2006. All of these achievements were marked with the award of a Fields Medal. Poincaré’s Analysis Situs (1895) was an early systematic treatment of topology, and he is often called the father of algebraic topology.

Poincaré’s main achievement in mathematical physics was his magisterial treatment of the electromagnetic theories of Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, and Hendrik Lorentz. His interest in this topic—which, he showed, seemed to contradict Newton’s laws of mechanics—led him to write a paper in 1905 on the motion of the electron. This paper, and others of his at this time, came close to anticipating Albert Einstein’s discovery of the theory of special relativity. But Poincaré never took the decisive step of reformulating traditional concepts of space and time into space-time, which was Einstein’s most profound achievement. Attempts were made to obtain a Nobel Prize in physics for Poincaré, but his work was too theoretical and insufficiently experimental for some tastes.

About 1900 Poincaré acquired the habit of writing up accounts of his work in the form of essays and lectures for the general public. Published as La Science et l’hypothèse (1903; Science and Hypothesis), La Valeur de la science (1905; The Value of Science), and Science et méthode (1908; Science and Method), these essays form the core of his reputation as a philosopher of mathematics and science. His most famous claim in this connection is that much of science is a matter of convention. He came to this view on thinking about the nature of space: Was it Euclidean or non-Euclidean? He argued that one could never tell, because one could not logically separate the physics involved from the mathematics, so any choice would be a matter of convention. Poincaré suggested that one would naturally choose to work with the easier hypothesis.

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Poincaré’s philosophy was thoroughly influenced by psychologism. He was always interested in what the human mind understands, rather than what it can formalize. Thus, although Poincaré recognized that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are equally “true,” he argued that our experiences have and will continue to predispose us to formulate physics in terms of Euclidean geometry; Einstein proved him wrong. Poincaré also felt that our understanding of the natural numbers was innate and therefore fundamental, so he was critical of attempts to reduce all of mathematics to symbolic logic (as advocated by Bertrand Russell in England and Louis Couturat in France) and of attempts to reduce mathematics to axiomatic set theory. In these beliefs he turned out to be right, as shown by Kurt Gödel in 1931.

In many ways Poincaré’s influence was extraordinary. All the topics discussed above led to the creation of new branches of mathematics that are still highly active today, and he also contributed a large number of more technical results. Yet in other ways his influence was slight. He never attracted a group of students around him, and the younger generation of French mathematicians that came along tended to keep him at a respectful distance. His failure to appreciate Einstein helped to relegate his work in physics to obscurity after the revolutions of special and general relativity. His often imprecise mathematical exposition, masked by a delightful prose style, was alien to the generation in the 1930s who modernized French mathematics under the collective pseudonym of Nicolas Bourbaki, and they proved to be a powerful force. His philosophy of mathematics lacked the technical aspect and profundity of developments inspired by the German mathematician David Hilbert’s work. However, its diversity and fecundity has begun to prove attractive again in a world that sets more store by applicable mathematics and less by systematic theory.

Most of Poincaré’s original papers are published in the 11 volumes of his Oeuvres de Henri Poincaré (1916–54). In 1992 the Archives–Centre d’Études et de Recherche Henri-Poincaré founded at the University of Nancy 2 began to edit Poincaré’s scientific correspondence, signaling a resurgence of interest in him.