cover image Henri Poincar%C3%A9: A Scientific Biography

Henri Poincar%C3%A9: A Scientific Biography

Jeremy Gray. Princeton Univ., $35 (616p) ISBN 978-0-691-15271-4

The great French mathematician Poincar%C3%A9's (1854%E2%80%931912) rigorous research and quest for understanding influenced fields as diverse as algebra, geometry, astronomy, and physics. Drawing on Poincar%C3%A9's voluminous notebooks, essays, and other writings, Gray, a math historian at Britain's Open University, chronicles Poincar%C3%A9'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 Poincar%C3%A9's life but concentrates on mathematician's wide-ranging and penetrating insights into celestial mechanics, topology, number theory, and algebraic geometry. Gray reveals Poincar%C3%A9'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 Poincar%C3%A9 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.)