NOTES ON MATHEMATICIANS

4. Henri Poincar~ (1854-1912~

C . .T. Chong
University of Singapore

For over two hundred and fifty year~, the French school
of mathematics had exerted great influence on the develop ·-
ment Df mathematical science. From the time of Descartes fl~
Fe rmat (2] , Pascal ~3 -. , Lagrange f4j and Laplace [5} , the
contributions by the French on geometry, arithmetic,
probability theory, celestial arid analytical mechanics had
been impressive. Their ' achievem~nts, however, were over-
shadowed by those o_f the German mathematician Gauss [61
vvhose universal genius remains unrivaled till this day -
after almost two .centuries. Yet in adhering to its great
tradition of pl~oducing men of al"b?, , sciences and literature,
two French ··mathematicians did emerge and make their mai'ks on
the book of mathematical luminaries during the latter half
of Gauss' · era. They were Cauchy (7] and Galois· [8] vlhil e
it is possible to conclude that Cauchy's work represent~d
the best that he could bave contributed to knowledge during
his lifetime of sixty-eight years, one wo~ld expect Galois
to have done more had he not ended his life rather abruptly
at: .t he early ag~.. of twenty-one. As.suming, as is generally
accepted, that .the mind is most creative before forty, ther e
were sti.ll nearly twenty years lying ahead for Galois. From
· this point of vie\v it is perhaps rather fortunate that the
important role played by French school did not end suddenly
when Galois had died· and Cauchy _pad grown old. The man who
came to succeed them did more than just keep up the tradition,
He gained the unofficial title 11
the greatest living mathe-
maticianH from the Germans (justly endowed on Gauss) and
made it a French property. He was Jules-Henri Poincare.

There is as yet no published book in English devoted

to the life and work of Poincar6. Nevertheless, he was

- 13 -
 . ·;f; "'l :· .
• . I. ~ •. ••

accorded a chapter iri : E -~-T. Bell 1 s Men pf Mathematics [9]

and his biographie~ can be found in both the Obituaries of
' . -
Fellows of the Rdyal Society (1915) and the Bulletin of t he
American Mathematical Society (1915;· (as a supplement to
E. Lebon 1 s Savants du Jour: Henri Poincare_, Biographie 3
Bibliographie analytique des B:Jrits (Paris, 1912)). There
are, however, numero~s French memoirs on Poincar~, and the
one written by the famous French mathematician Hadamard ~0]
(somewhat younger than Poincar~), "Eoincare le
entitled
mathematicien n (published in Revue d~ m~taphysique et de
morale (1913)"'), is of unsurpassed excellence. The memolr
F:/.,oge His to rique d 'Henri Poinoar~ (Paris, 1913) Hri t·ten by
Poincar6'~ contemporary Gaston Darboux [11] is also a very
good biogra~hical so~rce.

The l •ife. t:Henri Poinc-ar~ 'A7 aS a french savant who looked

alarmingly like the ,popular image of a French savant. He.
v1as short and plump, cd:rried an enormous head set off by a
thick spade beard and splendid ~ustache, was myopic,
11
stooped, pince-nez . glasses · attacheQ. to a black silk ribbon.
~2] . This was probably the impression that one had of
Poincare when the man was' at 'the pinnacle of his career.
He was born on April 29, 1854 at Nancy, Francy, the son of
a physicia~. It seems that the Poincare's had long been an
1
established family at Nancy. Poincai..l s ·grandfather, . for
example, w~s attached to the military hospital at the age
of twenty. His uncle, Antoine, became the inspector-
general of The department 6~ roads and bridges. The younger
g eneration appeared to 'have been most d:Lstinguished: H~:mri
rose to become the greatest w:athematician of · his time, and
Raymond, his cousin (son of Antoine), became the President
of France during the first world war.

According to Dd:rboux, Poincar~ pd:s~~d his childhood ln

11
a circle of savants, university men and polytechnicians. n
His father \oJas a professo~ in the medical faculty at t;hc
university, and }1i.s mother was a very r;ifted wornan \'llho pcJ.F

special attention to the education of her two children

- 14 -
(Poincare and his sister).

As a child he had shown great talent in reading. His

ability to recall from mernor·y every detail of the books
that he had read fascinated the teachers. In connection
with this, it is worthwhile to note that the "rnathematicizingn
of Poincare was markedly different from that of others -
whereas most mathematicians understand mathematical theorens
and proofs with the aid of paper and pencil, Poincare did
it only with his ears. Du~ to his poor eye-sight, he
attended all mathematical lectures in the university by
listening, without taking a note or following the syllabus.
People were amazed, but it seemed very natural to him.

His physical co-ordination had been bad since young.

And at the age of five, he suffered an attack of diphtheria
which left him with a paralyzed larynx for nine months.
Perhaps it was because of the physical handicaps that mor e
time was spent ln reading than in playing with boys of his
age .

. He \<JaS not drawn towards mathematics until the age of

fourteen or fifteen~ (As a digression, the Swiss mathematical
journal l 'Enseigner71~nt Mathematique' published :in 1908 a
report on the ~uestionaire sent out ·to living distin s uished
mathematicians all over the world; One of the questions
asked: In y o ur recollection, at what period and under what
cirqumstances did the taste for mathematics take possession
of you? Ninety-three replies to this question , ~ere received .
Thirty ··five placed the period before ten years of age,
forty-three from eleven to fifteen years of age, eleven
from sixteen to e ighteen years, thr~e from nineteen to
twenty years, and only one at twenty-six years of age.) Thu s
strictly speaking, Po incare did not even belong t o th e
most precocious group. His first love was natural history.
Till the end of ~is life, th~ love for natural history a nd
philosophy never ceased, and it expl a ins why ·toward s hi s ~-c::.st
years he wrote so prolifically .on the phil-osophy of scienc e

- 15 -
and mathematics. Yet his tremendous power in mathematical
reasoning was beginning to show during adolescence: when
one asked him to solve a difficult mathematical problem~

''the r'eply came like an arrow."

He first attended the Nancy lycee [13] , but the

education was disrupted due to the Franco-Prussian war 1n
18 7 0 ·-18 71, during which time the Germans occupied Nancy.
In Lis eager11es s to read the enemy's newspaper, he taught
himself German (he was then about sixteen years old). At
the end of 1871 he passed the entrance examination of the
Ecole Polytechnique [14] holding first place, despite the
zero mark given to the undecipherable geometrical diagrams
that he drew.

Several legends of his early days should be mentioned

here if only for the sake of understanding the man better
(see [9] ). On one occasion some students wanted to test
him out, eager to show that he·was really not as good as
what others had claimed. A tough mathematics question was
put forth. The students gathered around and waited for the
moment of triumph. Hithout seemingly glvlng any thought
to the problem, Poincar~ solved it on the spot and walked
off 5 leaving behind the startled students asking, ''Hmv did
he do it? 11 A question that others v-1ere to repeat for
many years to come.

His inability to :draw pictures that resembled anything

v.Jas I·Jell~known to his fellow students. Perhaps as a slgn
of ~heir affection for him, an arts exhibition was held at
the end of the year, featuring a collection of his g~eat

art works. To enhance appreciation, titles were given in

Greek to each piece of work - ·- !VHorse 11 , etc. Of course,
not always accurately. If Poincar~ had tried harder, he
would probably have made a great artist ln abstract paintin£!

In 1875 he left the Polytechnique (at the age of

twenty one) and entered the School of Mines "with the
int12ntion of becoming an engineer. v! The course work there

- 16 -
left .him with some time to do mathematics. This he spent
in working on a general problem in the theory o f
differential equations. He graduated from the Schoo l o f
Mines on March 26, 1879. In the same y e ar, on August 1~

he .. received the degr e e of doctor of mathematical sci e nc e s

from the University of Paris. The thesis which he
submitt~d originated from the results -that he h a d o btained
over the past tnree years. Darboux was asked to examine
. '··'

tile work . . "At the first glance, it Has cle ar to me that

the th~sis was out of the ordinary and amply merited
accep,tance. Ce~tainly it contained results enough to
;

11
supply material for several go o d theses. He He nt on t o
say, however, that there. were several plac e s in th e the sis
where id~as ~hould be e'lab"orafed ~ explanati o ns b e g iv en ,
and er~ofs be corrected ·~ Poincare· obliged by taking u p th:~
suggesti~ns, 11
but he explained to me that he had many other
id~as i~1· his head; he was already dccupied with some . o f
the great problems whose solUtion he was to ··,give us. l;

On December 1, 1879, he was appointed -to teach in ths

. F~cult~ des Sciences de Caen. Two years l~ter he was
appoint~d Maitre de Conferences in mathematical analysis
at the Universit~ de Paris, and ln 1886 (at the age of
tpirty two) he was promoted to the chair of professor of
mathematici!il physics and 'the calculus of probabilities.
He stayed on at th~ · Univers:U:y of Paris till the , end . of -h i s
life. He did, howev'e r, make' short Visits to European
'
countries and to the United ' State s. For e xample, h e was
an i~vited lecturer ai thi l90~ Ihte~national Co n gr e s s of
Arts and Scienceshel.d in ·St. Louis, ·: u.s.A., a nd in 1 90 9
he was at· th~ Univer-sity of ·G ottingeh, Ger!Ilany, at the
invitation of :1 the other great mathematician 11 Da vi d
Hilbert [15] .

The two had first met in the ~arly spring of 1886

vJhen Hilbert, as a young and aspirin g mathematicia n of
twenty-six, visited Paris. Poincar~ was only six ye a rs

- 17 -·
older than Hilbert, but had already published more than a
hundren papers. The impression that Poincare gave Hilbert
vJclS not too overwhelming: 11
He lectures very clearly and to
my way of thinking very understandably although, as a
French student here remarks, a little to fast. He ~ives

the impression of being very youthful and a bit nervous.

Even after our introduction, he does not seem to be very
friendly; but I am inclined to attribute this to his
apparent shyness, which I.·Ie have net yet been in a. position
11
to overcome because of our lack of linguistic ab:Llity. [16]
It was not until the turn of the century that his fame
began to catch up with Poincare's.

!n Hay of· the year that the hw men first met, Poincar :~

was elected to · l'Academie des Sciences. The proposal for

his electiori was accompanied by the statement that his work
~: is above ordinary pi'aise and reminds us inevitably of what
Jacobi [17 J wrote of Abel (18) - that he had settled
questions which, before him, were unimagined. It must
indeed be recognized that we are witnessing a math~~tical

revolution eomparable in every way to that ~.v;hich manifested

itself, half a century ago, by the accession of ellipt~c
• 'I I.·'

functions. 11
\:

Tf Hilbert was not overwhelmed in.Paris by Poincare's

presence, the story, related by the English mathematician
Sylvester [19] 'tells us how others had felton seeing the
man fd0 the first time. In 1885, the year before Hilbert
vi s ited Pciris, Sylvester ln his old ag~ made a pilgr"image .
to the French cap.i tal to meet . the man that the · mathematical
world had been talking about. He was astonished to
discover that the heralded Hnew star in mathematics" was
11
na mere boy, so blond, so young. "In: the presence of
thc.t mighty pent-up intellectual force my tongue ·. at first
. . . .
re f used its office, and it was not 'until I ha-d i:;F,J.ken some
time (it may b.e two or three minUtes) ·to peruse and
absorb, as it were, the idea of his external youthful
lineaments that I found myself in a condition to speak.'' C9]

- 18 -·
 The mathematical contributions of Poincare encompassed
many branches of pure and applied mathematics: the theory
· of automorphic . funct"io~s in . anal~sis (perhaps his best work
. in pure ::nathemati~s), t:he theory of .numbers, topology, the
many-body problem 'in mathematical _astronomy (the work for
which he wa.'~- a:warded a prize by King Oscar II .of Sweden in
:1 .88'7 and ·made . a Knight. of t 'he Legion of Honor by the French
goverrdni:;n:t) ~ and mathem~ti~al . physics. By the turn bi the
:, cen:t·ury ,· he . took up several new interests: ' the philosophy
e>f . science and mathematics, a.nd the psychology · of · fuathe-
maticai irivention. During the thirty-four years of his
scientific career, he published more than thirty books· on
'm athematical · physics and astronomy and ne~rly five hun~red
research papers on rna thematics. .In addi t:ion to .these· . he
wrote two books of popular essays and three _fa!flou.s volumes
on the. philosophy of · science aHd mctlhc-m.=~.+i ,.,c;:
!. . '
.c:r-.' '"'"'?~=''' n.,..d
.,

Hypothesi.s~ The Value of Science~ Seience a'Y!d Me"f<hod~

Story .has. it that in the early days when t~ese
' ' . . b~oks
.
were . ~. ;

.first published, . it was · not ·. uncommon to s.:;e working ,men and

wc:l,II;len ; read,i.ng then . during lunch or coffee hours, in, the ,s ide
walk .cafes of Paris. As Jourdain said, "One of - .the' many. -' . .· ~

reas~ns that , he will live is because he made .it possible for

usto 1:-1nderstand hi!n as well as to admire him.ll [20] For
,1: ,i

the literary - quality of his essays, he w~s elected in 1908

,. as one of the . forty members of the prestigi..ous Fren9h .
Ac0demy . .. This is all the more remarkable since Poincare
was, f~~st and foremost, a scientist. ·
. .
·:; The latter part of Poincare's life was .. c~m·med with
medals and "honors.' ' T'h~· gold medal of the Royal Astronomical
Society; the . Sylvester medal of ~l,"le Royal Society, the
Lobachc;vskii medal of the. Physic9-Mathematical Society of
Kazan:, and the ' Bolyai prize of the Hungarian Academy of
Scienc·e s (21] , had all been awarded to him on various
occasions in recognition of his achievements in mathematics.

: He ·was happily married with a son and three daughtE~ t· s ,

and loved ~lassical music. His health had been good until

- 19 -
he was taken ill by the enlargement of the prostate in 1908
. while attending the International Congress Mathematicians
at Rome, Italy. The trouble was temporarily r~l~eved by
surgeons and he resumed his work immediately upon returning
to Paris. His health deteriorated and by December 1911 h e
began to feel that time was running out. He asked the
editor of a mathematical journal to accept an unfinished
paper on a problem which he believed to be very significant:
"At my age, I may not be able to solve it, and the results
obtained, susceptible of putting researchers on a new and
unexpected path, seem to me too full of promise, in spite
of the deceptions they have caused me, that I should resi p;n
myself to sacrificing them.'' (Se'e (9]) . .

In an address on. Poinc'a.re' s work, the mathematician

Vito Volterra said in .connection with the unfinished paper
that "among the various ways of conceiving man's affection
for life, there is one in which that desire has a majestic
aspect . . It is ' quite different from the way one usually
regards the feeling of the fear of death. There come
moments when the mind of a scientist engenders new ideas.
He sees their fruitfulness and utility, but ; h~ · knows that
they are still so vague that he must go through a long
process of analysis to develop . them before the public will
be able to understand and appreciate them at their just
value. If he believes then that death may suddenly
annihilate this whole world of great thn u ;::ht:s, and that
perhaps ages may go by before another discovers · them, we
can understand that a sudden desire to live must seiz e hiw ,
c.nd the joy of his work must pe confounded with the fear of
having it stop . forever. [2 2] .. The problem was sol VC!. d so o::-1
11

after the unfinished paper appeared, by the :l~i'Ilerican rnat hc--

ma·tician George David Birkhoff . [2 3)

In the spring of 1912 he fell ill agaln. During tha t

summer --- i n his fifty-ninth year --Poincare died.

- 20 -
Mathematical achievements. It was PoincarE:'s style to
change the topics of his lectures every year. They covered
both· pure and applied mathematics: automorphic function,
topology (called analysis situs by him), numbe~ theory, the
equilibrium of fluid masses, the mathematics of eisbtri6~ty,
astronomy, thermodynamics and light, and the calculus of
probability. During his visit ' to GBttingen in 1904, he
lectured on integral equations. Many of these lectures were
published soon after they had been d~livered at the
university.

We will only describe briefly Poincare's mathematical

achievements .

Pure mathematics: Before the age of thirty, he

initiated the · study of automorphic func ,t ions - functions
that are invariant under a group of tr:1nsformations of the
form f(z) = (az+b)/(cz+d) where z lS a complex variable,
and a ,b ,c ,d are complex numbers. He . shmved, fox' example.,
that one could use these functions to solve linear
differential equations ,with rational algebraic coefficients.
The theory·of automorphic functions and forms has today
dev~loped into one of the deepest subjects in mathematics,
closely related to the theories of complex multiplication
and arithmetic-<cf . [24] for details).

His Analysis ~itus (published in 1895) gave an early

systematic treatment of topology. The notions of fundamental
group and homology werefirst introduced there. The famous
Poincare conjec.ture in topology, despite the great advanc.;:.
mad e by Smale . (25] , remains unsolved till this day: Every
compact, simply·-connected three-dimensional manifold is
homs am~r?hlC to the three-sphere S 3 •

In arithmetic, Poincare showed that the notion of

binary quadratic forms introduced by Gauss could be cast
in geometric form. We note here that there are essentially
two 'types' of :fuath8matians: the· ones who prefer to
nmathematicize 7; and.ZytiaaZly ·- resorting to geometric

- 21 -
 pictures only occasionally, and the ones who would like to
put every mathematical problem into a geometric perspective.
Poinciar6 belonged to the latter (even though he could not
draw anything properly!)
~

Applied _Mathematics: Poincare's most outstanding

contri~utibn in this area was to the problem of 'three
bodies'.· The cl~ssigal 'n-body problem' siates~ ·assuming
that the masses, motions and relative gista.nces of n-boc}.ies
(such as the f?1,m, moon, and earth for n= 3) are known at a
given time, what will the configuration of the system be at
1

any future time, if then-bodies attract ohe another

_problem, anci ' in the course of sblving it, > mad~ fundamental
discoveries
-
on the behaviour
. .
of the solutions of differential
equations near singulari ti,es. ·commenting ~n. the work'
Weierstrass (26} said_, 11
Its publication ~-vill inaugurate
-a new era in the history
~ -~ . ..
of
.
celestial mechanics . ·n

He contributed to thE? st~dy of the · ~volutinn of celestial

· hodi~s by describ.lng the conditions of stability of the
• pei=ir-shape' figures;, He showed that a spherical mass
which rotates with increa.sing speed Hill defo~m .into a '_pear-
shaped' mass, then Hh()llow out more and more at
its 'Haist', until finally it sep~rates into two distinct
and unequal bodiesn. (see [9} ) .

In a paper 'on the dynamics of th~- electr,on published

·in 1,906, he obtained =- independently - + many of the results
of Einste:Lri 1 s'. c:special theory of relativity. And finally,
in_his extensive writings 0!1 :probability theory he anticipated
the concept of-erg':ldicity that is basic to statistical
mechanics.

Philosophy of sc1ence and mathematics. Poincare's v1e~.vs on

scientific hypotheses p~operly _ classifies him as a
pragmatist. Josiah Royce [27} wr~i tes in the introduction
to the English translation of Poincar~'s Foundations of

- 22 -
Science [28] that essentially there ar e two kinds of useful
hypotheses in s'cience: those whi ch are valuable precisel y
because they are verifiable or refutable through experiment s,
and those who are suggested by exper1ence but are neither
v e rifiable nor refutable. The importance of the first kind
is evident, whil~ Poincar~ made explicitly prominent the
existence and importance of the second kind of hypotheses.
According to Poincare, ·this second kind constitutes an
essentia.l . human way _of viewing nature. In the ..vords of
II
Royce, an interpret&tion rather than a portrayal or a
prediction of the objective facts of nature, an a d justment
of our conceptions of things to the internal needs of our
intelligence, rather than a grasping of things as they are
in themselves." Thiswould imply that hypotheses of the
second kind are adopted for convenience, by convention and
because of the. usefulness thE7Y give in interpreting physical
phenomena .. They are . neither wholly subjective and arbi trary~

nor are they imposed upon us. by the necessity of physica l

reality. As a result, such hypotheses may be changed,
amended or discarded in the course of time.

Poincare gave examples to illustrate his point:

nMasses are · coefficients it is convenient to introduce into
calculatio~s. We could reconstruct all mechanics by
attributing different values to all the masses. This new
mec h anics would not be in contradiction either with
experience or with the general principles of dynamics.
Onl y the equations of this new mechanics would be less
simple. 11
[29] 11
Of two watches, TtJe have no right to say
that o~e goes true, the other wrong: we can only say that
it is advantageous to conform to the indications o f the
first. !i [30] 11
Absolute space , that is to say, the mar k
to which it would be ne6essary to refer the earth to k now
whether it really moves, has no , objective . existe nce ...
11
The two propositions: The earth turns around 11 and ri t i s
more convenient to suppose the earth turns around' ha.v,:;
the same fueaning; there is nothing more i n the one than

- 23 -
in the other." .(30] Thus the Kantian notion [31] of
synthetic a priori 'spatial ~eometry' oade no ~ense to
Poincarg, He believed that the geometry ; adopted by us was
of the most convenierr_t , and advantageous kind; it was,
however' no "truer 11 than any other kind of geometry.

Poincare?-s philosophy of mathematics centered around

two points: it is not possible to reduce all of mathematics
to logi~ (by this he meant logic of propositional calculus
together• with an appropriate set of axioms which does not
include th~ axiom of i~d~ction-for instance Hilbert's
. . .

axioms for geometry), and there does not exist 'actual

infinite' as proposed 'by Georg Cantor [32] His argument
was rather forceful in those days when the foundations
of set theory were yet to be laid by Zermelo [33] _, Fraenkel
~.34] , Godel (3 s] , and von Neumann [3 6] , whose works
would not be completed until almost thirty years after his
death, and also when the notion of 'synatical proof' \vas
still in its embryonic stage. The logicist school contended
that given the basic rules of logical reasoning and a set
of axioms, one could derive from these all the true theorems.
Poincare, however, thought that such a feat could not be
accomplished without the aid of mathematical intuition -
something that could not be formalized into symbols. Of
course, Russ-e ll [37) and vJhi tehead [38] were · the chief
proponents of logicism, while Hilbert held a somewhat
similar view. Subsequent events showed that both side~
# 4 •

had been partly wrong and partly right. Godel ln 1931

(at 24) showed that the logicists' ambition could be
cari'ied out in the case of propositional calculus but not
in the case of the Peano · ~9] axioms for arithmetic. In
a way, Godel's results showed how seemingly eloquent
philosophical arguments would collapse in the face of
critical mathematical investigations. This was, of cours e,
not the first time in the history of mankind. · One need
only recall Kant's 'absoluteness' of Euclidean geo~ e try ·
and the advent of non-Euclidean geometry that subsequehtly

- 2LJ. -
took place.

In set theory, Poincar~ thought that Cantor's notion

of 'actual infinity' was untenable as it led to a host of,
by now classical, antinomies [Lf o] VJhile various attempts
were made to remedy the defects, Poincare insisted that no
such attempts would be successful unless it be proved that
the resulting axioms were free from contradiction. This
should be the case even when the truth of the axioms was
intuitively.clear. Little did he envisage that what he
demanded was prec~sel~ what G~del proved to be impossible
twenty years after his death: if set theory is contradiction-
free, no proof of this fact could be carried.out (within the
realm of . the aiioms).

It is perhaps regrettable that Poincar~ with his

universal genius could not see the significance of Cantor 1 s
work hidden underneath the apparently unremovable antinomies.
Suppo~ters of Cantor expressed their stand in- different
manners. Hermite [41} and Hadamard did it in a very mild
Hay, while Hilbert was more outspoken. !'Cantor's set
theory is the finest product of mathematical genius, and
one of the supreme achieve~ents of purely intellectual
human activity,~: he said, 11
And no one shall take away the
paradise that Cantor has created fro us! 11
(see [16] )

Psychology of mathematical invention. Hmv is mathematical

invention possible? This mental activity which seems to
take least from the outside world, and which seems to
"act only of itself and on itself" [42] , appears to be
l"a-ther' mysterious. Poincare was probably the first mathe
matician to have analy~ed this activity and to have \. rvi tten
out his findings in a language intelligible to the layman.

· Idc~ally, a good mathematician should have a memory of

a first-rate chess player (who can visuali~~ and memorize
various combinations of moves) and should be as accurate
as a computer in calculations. 'Tr~is sometim&s happens -
as in -the case of Gauss, Bht Poin8arc ' admi'tted, for example ,

•• 2 5 -
ttlat he was a poor chess player and often made errors in
calculations. How is it, then that he could produce mathe·-
matical works of the first order?

In his opinion, there 1s a certain feeling - t h e

intuition of mathematical order which is possessed by
e v e ry good mathematician. It is a feeling which is hard to
def i ne, but with :v1hich one discovers harmonies in mathe-
ma·t ~.. cal · s'tructures and relates various mathematical ideas.
Mos t peo~l~~ill ~ot have this delicate feeling~ nor will
they have the 'strength of memory and calculating ability
that is bey~tid the ordinary. These people will be
absolutely incapable of understandin~g higher mathematics.
Some others .will have .this feeling in a slight 4egree, but
will be very good in memory and calculation. They can
understand mathematics and make applications, but they
cannot create. Still others will pos~ess this special
intuition to a larger degree. Their memory and calculating
ability may be just ordinary, but the,y <;;an create good
mathematics.

vvhat then is mathematical invention? It is the ability

to d iscern and choose, from among the infinite possibilities
of combinations of mathematical entities, those which al:"e
useful and will lead to a new mathematical law. These
'correct' combinations re~eal a hitherto unsuspected kinship
b e tHeen matheMatical truths.

To furth 2r illustrate his point, Poincar~ presented

several instances from his own experiences. His account
was so complete and excellent that one cannot but be
tempted to reproduce it. The following is an excerpt fro m
/

nror fifteen days I strove to prove that thE:re

could not be any functions like those I have since
called fuchsian functions [43] I was then v e r y
ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work tabl e
stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of
combinations and reached no results. One evening,
contrary to ~y custom, I drank black coffee and
could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt
them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak,
making a stable combiria,tinn. By the next morning
I had established the existence of a class of
Fuchsian · functions, those which come from hyper-
geometric series; I had only· to wr.ite out the
results, which took but a few hours.
"Just at this time I left Caen, where I was
then living' to go or{ a geological excursion under
the ausp:i,ces of the school of mines·. 1'he changes
of travel made me forget my mathematical work.
Having reached Coutances, we ·. entered an omnibus to
·,

go some place or other. At the moment when I put

t.; ..~:
my 'foot .on the step the idea came to me, without
ariything in my former thoughts seeming -to have
paved .the way for it, that the transformations I
had: U;sed tc define the Fuchsian functions · were
identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.
I did not verifY the idea;.~~ but I felt a perfect
certainty. On my retur'n to Caen ., I ve~ified the
result at my leisure.
uThen I returned my attention to the study
of some arithmetic questions apparently without
much succ.e ss and without a suspicion of any
connec·tion with my preceeding researches.
Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few
days at the seaside, and thought of something else.
One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came
to me~ ~vi th just the same characteristic of brevity,
suddenne _s s and iirunediate certainty, that the ari th-
metic transformations of intermediate ternary
quadratic forms were identical with those of non-
Euclidean geometry.
"Thereupon I left for Mont-Velerien, where I

- 27 -
 was to go through my military service; so I was
very differently occupied. One day, going along
the street, the solution of the difficulty which
had stopped me sudder;tly appeared to me. I did
not try to go deep into it immediately, and only
after my service did I again take up the. question.
I had all the ele.ments and had only to. arnange
them and put .them together. So I wrote out my
final memoir at a single stroke and without
difficulty~"

Thus to Poincar~, the process of mathematical invention

consist$ of three stages: conscious work on a difficult
problem (work which will end up in failure due to lack of
progress); . uncon~9ious work carried out by the sublimal
self ·· (the stage in which sudd~n illumination appears) ;
and again conscious work (the stage
·: '
of' rearranging ideas,
... ·

putting them in the right order). The success of the

unconscious work cannot happen without the long)arduous and
fruitless hours spent working consciously on the problem.
The second period of conscious work is used to organise and
relate the inspired ideas, and to verify their validity.

E.T. Bell called Poincare "the last universalist."

Judging from the tremendous amount of work carried out by
Hilbert, it may be more appropriate to award the title to
the man six years junior to Poincare, for no one ever since
has been able to achieve as mudh. Yet Poincare was beyond
doubt a universalist of the very first class. He was
probably the only scientist whose popular essays ha.d been
translated into no less than six foreign languages: English ,
GePman, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. He is the
only math e matician whose name appears in the title of a
math 2matical journal: Annates de Z '1.:nstitut Henri Poinoar~,
. .
published in two sections (mathematical physics and calculus
o f probabilities) by the French Academy of Science). His
·:-!

- 28 -
extensive wTitings were compiled and published by the Paris
Academy of Science as Oeuvres de Henri ~incar~ (Collected
works of Henri Poincare) 3 a total of ten volumes which
appeared progres~ively from 1916 to 195~. His genius Will
be recognized in the future as it has always been, and it:
is unlikely that future generations will revise the
judgement that he ran)<s among the greatest mathematicians
of ·all time.

Notes

[ 1 ..1, Ren6 Descartes (1596-1650), philosopher and mathe-

matician, Invented analytic geometry.

[ 2] Pierre Fermat (1601~1665), .jurist and mathematician;

contributed to the theory of arithmetic and
probability; best known for his Last Theorem (see
H.N. Ng, "An elementary problem whose solution can
If •
lead to fame: Fermat's . Last Theorem, th~s 'sdZey~

vol.3, No.2 (1975), pp.54-6l).

-· l
l3j Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), theologian and mathematician;
contributed to geometry and founded, with Fermat, the
mathematical theory of probability.

[4] Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), contributed to

arithmetic and celestial mechanics.

[sj Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) 3

politician and lllathematician- contributed to

celestial mechanics, mathematical physics and
probability.
._:i ;
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), 'the prince of
mathemq,ticians ' . (see [9]), contributed significant::y
to almost every branch of pure and applied mathematic c., .
11
:See C.T.Chong, Notes on mathematicians 1: Carl

- 29 - .
 Friedrich Gauss, 11 this Medley, Vol.3, No.1, (1975)
pp. 6-10.

[7 'j' Augustin Cauchy (1789-1857), contributed to analysis

and was one of the founders of complex function theory.

Evariste Galois (1811-1832), made fundamental

discoveries on the solvability of equations by
radicals at the age of seventeen; killed in a duel
at hventy-one.

(g1 E.T. Bell, Men of mathematics~ Simon and Schuster,

'- J
New York, 1937.

r~ Jacques Hadamard (1865-1963), French mathematician

whom Birkhoff (see [25} ) hailed as 'Poincare's
successor'; contributed to number theory) analysis
and geometry as well as educational, philosophical
and psychological aspects of mathematics; taught at
College de France; died at 98.

[11J Gaston Darboux (1842-1917), French mathematician;

contributed to geometry.

James Newmann, The World of,Mathematics~ Vol.2.

'Commentary on Poincare~' George Allen and Unwin,
London, 1956.

fi::i\ State maintained ·secondary School at Nancy.

~14] Engineering School under the direction of the

Ministry of the Armed Forces; established in 1794;
has 'faculties of mathematics, rn'e chanical engineering,
physics, and .chernistry.

i15J David Hilbert ( 1961-1943), German mathematician and

theoretical physicist- taught at G~ttingen;
contributed to various branches of pure and applied
mathematics; was known toge ther with Poincare as th~

two leading mathematicians in the early twentieth

century ; see (1~

- 3 0 -·
~~ Constance Reid, Hilbert~ Springer Verlag, Berlin,
1970.

[17] Carl Jacobi ( 18 04-18 51), German mathematic ian;

contributed· to ellipt.iJc .:tncl abelian functions,
arithmetic, dynamic&, algebra.

[1~ Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829), Norwegian mathe-

matician; c:ontribu'ted to abelian function theory '.
See Oystein Ore, ~iels ' Henrik Abel: M~thematician
Extraordinary~ University bf Minries~ta Press,
Minneapolis, 1957.

0-~ Jam~s : Joseph Sylve~ter (1814:1897), British·

mathematician; taught in Europe arid America;
contributed to algebraA ,

[2 oJ Philip Jourdain, obituary of Poincare in The Monist~

vol.21, 1912, pp.611 et seq.

~fj Nikolai I. Lobachevskti (1793-1856) and Janos Bolyai

( 18 0 2-18 60) , Russian and Hungarian mathematician ' ·
respectively; made fundamental contributions to non-·
Euclidean geometry.
" .,
l2 2J Vi to Vol terra, Henri Poincare, H.ice Institute
pamphlet, vol.l, no.2, pp.113-162 (1915).

(23] George David Birkh,off (1884-·1944), :American mathe-

matician; studied at. the Uni.versi ty of Chicago 5 and
taught at Harvard.
. 1
~~ Jean-Pierre Serre, Cours D'A~ithmetique, Presses
Universitaites de France, Paris, l970.

Stephen Smale (1930· · ) , American mathe~atician;

solved the generalized Poincare conjecture for
~anifolds of dim~hsion n ~ ~' (Annals of Mathematica ~
 vol.74, 1961, pp.39l-406); one of the four 1966
recipients of the Fields' Medal (equivalent to
the Nobel prize in other sciences, awarded once
every four years to young.mathematicians who
have accomplished significant works); studied
at Michigan, now professor at the University of
· California, Berkeley.

8~ Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897), German mathematician;

one of the founders of mathematical analysis;
contributed to the ' theory of functions.

[21] Josiah Royce ( 1855-1916) ., American philosopher;

studied at Johns Hopkins University and taught at
Harvard; a pioneer of the American school of
philosophy.

[2 a] Translated by G. B. Halsted; published by th~

Science Press, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1913.

~~ Science and Hypothesis.

[3 o] The Va Z.ue of Science •,

[3~ Emmanuel ·Karit (1724-1804), German philosopher;

- held tha't there was but erie 'true ' -geometry _,.,_
the Euclidean geometry.

[32J Georg Cantor (1845-1918), German mathematician;

best known for the invention of set theory;
suffered several nervous breakdowns due to
opposition of several mathematicians to his theor y:
died in a mental hospital .

. [33] Ernst Zermelo (1971-1953), German mathematicism;

with A.A. Fraenkel introduced axiomatic set theory
the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory of sets, cts is now
~.t··

cornmonly knovm; studied at Gottingep under Hilb'ert.

-· 3 2 -·
G~ Abraham A.Fraenkel(l891-1966), taught at the
Hebrew University of Je~u ~ a~ e m a n ~ s e t up a strong
school of logic there .

Kurt Godel (1907- ), Ge rman mathematician;

studied at the University of Vienna; made
fundamental contributions to mathematical logic;
probably the greatest living logician today;
emigrated to America during second world war;
became a permanent member of the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton.

[36] John von Neumann ( 1903-1957), Hungarian-born

mathematician; pontributed to various branches of
pure and applied mathematics and computer science;
became a permanent member of the Institute for
Advanced STudy, Princeton. See Y. K. Leong,
"Notesort mathematicians: 3. John _ von Neumann",
this Medley, vol.3, no.3, 1975, 90-106.

~~ Bertrand Russell (1872-l970~with Whitehead considered

two of the most influential British philosophers of
the present century; their joint work Brincipia
Mathematica attempted to formalize mathematics
and to derive every mathematical truth from a set
of logical axioms; taught at Cambridge and received
Nobel prize for literature in 1952.

~~ Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), taught Russell

at Cambridge, and later became professor at Harvard j
where he died.

[3~ Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932), Italian mathematician ;.

introduced the Peano axioms for number theory.
11 ~ a ~e
For example, the set of all sets which"not me mbers
of themselve s is both a member of itself and not a
member of itself.

~~-
~
Charles Hermi te (1922-1905), French mathe matician ;
contributed to algebra and number theory .

- 33 -
[-42} .!!Mathematical creation 17 , ln Science and Method.

(43} Now known as automorphic functions; named Fuchsian

by Poincar~ in honour of the German analyst, Lazarus
Fuchs (1833-1902).

** *******

For the student it is very instructive

to learn not only the final result, the final
formulation, but also the history of its
<
development. For in this way he not only
gains an insight into the process of
intellectual development, but also realizes
that the difficulties which he may encounter
in a~~imilating the new ideas are not
necessarily due to inferiority on his part,
but rather to the high degree of sophistic-
ation required for grasping . the-ideas in
question. Realizi~g the misfortunes of his
predecessors, he is less discouraged by his
own.

--Antoni Zygmund(l900-)

·- 34 -