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. Poincaré entered the École Polytechnique as the top qualifier in 1873 and graduated in 1875. He graduated from the Lycée in 1871 with a baccalauréat in both letters and sciences.ĭuring the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he served alongside his father in the Ambulance Corps. However, poor eyesight and a tendency towards absentmindedness may explain these difficulties. His poorest subjects were music and physical education, where he was described as "average at best".
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. 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. In 1862, Henri entered the Lycée in Nancy (now renamed the Lycée Henri-Poincaré in his honour, along with Henri Poincaré University, also in Nancy). Plaque on the birthplace of Henri Poincaré at house number 117 on the Grande Rue in the city of Nancyĭuring his childhood he was seriously ill for a time with diphtheria and received special instruction from his mother, Eugénie Launois (1830–1897). Another notable member of Henri's family was his cousin, Raymond Poincaré, a fellow member of the Académie française, who would serve as President of France from 1913 to 1920. His younger sister Aline married the spiritual philosopher Émile Boutroux. His father Léon Poincaré (1828–1892) was a professor of medicine at the University of Nancy. Poincaré was born on 29 April 1854 in Cité Ducale neighborhood, Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, into an influential French family.
Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Hendrik Lorentz in 1905. 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. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology. 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 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.Īs a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. Jules Henri Poincaré ( UK: / ˈ p w æ̃ k ɑːr eɪ/, French: ( listen) 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science.