Henri Poincaré

Born 29 April 1854, Jules Henri Poincaré trained as a mathematician, physicist, and engineer, then proceeded to leave his mark on pure math, applied math, celestial mechanics, and the philosophy of science in equal measure. His research on the three-body problem led him to discover chaotic deterministic systems, laying the groundwork for chaos theory; he created the field of algebraic topology, introduced automorphic forms, and in the early 20th century posed the Poincaré conjecture — unsolved for a century until Grigori Perelman cracked it in 2002–2003. He was first to present the Lorentz tra…