 | Henri Poincare Subjects: TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Engineering (General).; SCIENCE / Physics.; MATHEMATICS / General.; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Science & Technology.; MATHEMATICS / History & Philosophy.; Scientists; The great French mathematician Poincare's (1854-1912) rigorous research and quest for understanding influenced fields as diverse as algebra, geometry, astronomy, and physics. Drawing on Poincare's voluminous notebooks, essays, and other writings, Gray, a math historian at Britain's Open University, chronicles Poincare's remarkable achievements in language that is by turns sparkling and dense. The biography of a mind, Gray's narrative doesn't linger over the details of Poincare's life but concentrates on mathematician's wide-ranging and penetrating insights into celestial mechanics, topology, number theory, and algebraic geometry. Gray reveals Poincare's work pattern: when reflecting on a topic, he liked to walk about; he took few notes when preparing to work and often approached a problem without any idea of a solution. One of his most celebrated achievements was cracking the three-body problem, which asserted the impossibility of predicting the relationships among three bodies moving under mutual gravitational attraction. Chock full of the equations and formulas that Poincare developed to support and prove his groundbreaking work, Gray's intellectual biography deftly illuminates the workings of a fertile mind but the volume will be most appreciated by the devoted math and science reader. 13 b&w photos. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Jeremy Gray is professor of the history of mathematics at the Open University, and an honorary professor at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (Princeton). |
