Henri Poincare
Henri Poincare
Jules Henri Poincaréwas a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth29 April 1854
CountryFrance
science issues logic
Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.
sole source experiments
Experiment is the sole source of truth.
teaching long important
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects; they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.
doe theory asks
One does not ask whether a scientific theory is true, but only whether it is convenient.
ideas feet way
I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.
law succeed moments
If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.
prayer rain thinking
Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer.
hypothesis
Hypotheses are what we lack the least.
mind world natural
. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
science simplicity imagine
The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
party mean passion
Thought must never submit, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, save to the facts themselves, because, for thought, submission would mean ceasing to be.
absolute-certainty certainty foreseeing
It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.
giving feelings elegance
What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
ideas one-day different
I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connexion with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.