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
spiritual believe thinking
Doubting everything and believing everything are two equally convenient solutions that guard us from having to think
ideas imagination long
For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.
wish study mathematics
If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
nature philosophical purpose
Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.
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.
race disease topology
Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
sole source experiments
Experiment is the sole source of truth.
science
Deviner avant de démontrer! Ai-je besoin de rappeler que c'est ainsi que se sont faites toutes les découvertes importantes.
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.
purpose half littles
Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose.
business ideas clouds
Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
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.