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: Professor Ferdinand Verhulst, University of Utrecht, Netherlands

Der »Blick über den Tellerrand« ist eine interdisziplinäre Vortragsreihe des Felix-Klein-Zentrums für Mathematik mit wechselnden Themen. Er findet einmal im Monat im Fraunhofer ITWM, Fraunhofer-Platz-1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, statt.