Henri Poincaré

Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) was a French mathematician and physicist, often described as the last person to command the whole of mathematics. Born in Nancy, he taught at the Sorbonne from 1881 and worked on differential equations, celestial mechanics, topology, which he largely founded, and the three-body problem, and he came close to the special theory of relativity independently of Einstein. For general readers he wrote Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905) and Science and Method (1908), which argued that the axioms of geometry are conventions and that scientific invention depends on unconscious selection. His cousin Raymond Poincaré was president of France during the First World War.