Vortragsreihe »Blick über den Tellerrand«  /  15. Oktober 2013, 17.00 - 18.30 Uhr

Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), impatient genius

Henri Poincaré was one of the most prolific scientists of all times with a wide interest in literature, natural phenomena, geometry, politics and many other topics. He pursued his education in Paris at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. For a brief period he was a mining engineer, but switched to a mathematics lecturing position in Caen and shortly afterwards to Paris where he taught mathematics, celestial mechanics and mathematical physics. Already famous among scientists, he became well-known to the general public by his prizes and his books of philosophical essays published by Flammarion. It is remarkable that Poincaré started whole new fields: dynamical systems (with strong interactions between geometry and analysis), automorphic functions and topology. He was a founder of Special Relativity, together with Lorentz and Einstein.

 

Referent: Prof. Ferdinand Verhulst von der University of Utrecht,  Niederlanden.