A Biography of Henri Poincar\'e - 2012 Centenary of the Death of Poincar\'e

Abstract

On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of Poincar\'e. In this paper I present a personal and scientific biographical sketch of Poincar\'e, which does not in any way reflect Poincar\'e's rich personality and immense activity in science: When Poincar\'e traveled to parts of Europe, Africa and America, his companions noticed that he knew well everything from statistics to history and curious customs and habits of peoples. He was almost teaching everything in science. He was so encyclopedic that he dealt with the outstanding questions in the different branches of physics and mathematics; he had altered whole fields of science such as non-Euclidean geometry, Arithmetic, celestial mechanics, thermodynamics and kinetic theory, optics, electrodynamics, Maxwell's theory, and other topics from the forefront of Fin de Si\`ecle physical science. It is interesting to note that as opposed to the prosperity of biographies and secondary papers studying the life and scientific contributions of Albert Einstein, one finds much less biographies and secondary sources discussing Poincar\'e's life and work. As opposed to Einstein, Poincar\'e was not a cultural icon. Beginning in 1920 Einstein became a myth and a world famous figure. Although Poincar\'e was so brilliant in mathematics, he mainly remained a famous mathematician within the professional circle of scientists. He published more papers than Einstein, performed research in many more branches of physics and mathematics, received more prizes on his studies, and was a member of more academies in the whole world. Despite this tremendous yield, Poincar\'e did not win the Nobel Prize.