Russell believes that the greatest figure in France at the beginning of this century is Henry Poincare. "When I recently visited Guy Su Lusha in the ventilation lounge in Poincare, ... my tongue suddenly lost its function. It was not until I spent some time (maybe two or three minutes) carefully studying and putting up with that young face, which can be said to be the external form of his thought, that I found myself able to start talking. "
This "so beautiful, so young" child turned out to be the author of the papers that flooded in and predicted the arrival of Cauchy's successor. This is 1885, when Sylvester, a British mathematician who founded the American Journal of Mathematics, met Poincare.
The 80-year history of Poincare's death tells us how correct the conclusions of Russell, Sylvester and Adama are! Poincare published about 500 scientific papers and 30 scientific works in his life, covering almost all fields of mathematics and many important fields such as theoretical physics and astrophysics.
Speaking of Poincare, most mathematicians will immediately think of a famous evaluation: Poincare is the last all-rounder in mathematics, that is, he is the last mathematician who has made profound achievements in all branches of mathematics. Equally famous is Poincare's famous saying: Mathematicians are born, not made. Before Poincare, one of the most recent mathematical generalists was Gauss.
In addition to being a mathematician, Poincare was also an influential physicist, thanks to his descendants, including Einstein, who was working to improve the special theory of relativity at that time.
1854 On April 29th, Henry Poincare was born in a scholar's family in Nancy, France. The Poincare family enjoys a high reputation in France. Henry Poincare's father and brother-in-law are professors at Nancy University, while his cousin Raymond Poincare is an academician of the French Academy. He became the French president from 19 13- 1920.
Because of his poor eyesight, Poincare performed poorly in music and physical education class. Besides, Poincare is excellent in all aspects. Poincare's talent for mathematics had already appeared before he went to college. His math teacher described him as a "math monster", which swept away almost all honors, including the first prize in the French high school subject competition.
1873, poincare entered the Paris polytechnic, where he was able to engage in mathematics that he was good at, studied under the famous mathematician Charles Hermite, and published his first academic paper. Later, Poincare continued to study for a doctorate with Hermite. 1879 received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Paris, and 1887 was elected to the French Academy of Sciences, and later served as the president. 1906 was elected as an academician of the French Academy, which is the highest honor of French scholars. Around 1875, Poincare graduated from Polytechnic University and entered Nancy University of Mining and Technology to continue studying mathematics and mining. After graduation, I joined the French mining group (CorpsdesMines) and became an inspector of mining areas in northeast France. At the same time, Poincare continued his research under the guidance of Hermite. For most of his life, Poincare never gave up his engineering career. Responsible for 188 1 to 1885 northern railway construction. A few years later, he became the chief engineer of the French mining group and finally retired as a director.
Three-body problem, blockbuster
1885, in the seventh volume of Swedish mathematical magazine ActaMathematica, a striking announcement appeared: in order to celebrate the 60th birthday of King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway in 1889, ActaMathematica will hold a mathematical problem contest with a prize of 2,500 kronor and award a gold medal. There are four topics in the competition. The first topic is to find all the solutions of multi-body problems. This is a generalization of three-body in astrophysics. Poincare began to study the many-body problems of the solar system during his doctoral studies.
But Poincare finally failed to give a complete answer, because he found that the evolution of this system was often chaotic. "Chaos" means that if there is a small disturbance in the initial state, such as a small deviation in the initial position of an individual, then the subsequent States may be very different. In other words, if this small change cannot be detected by our measuring instruments, we can't predict the final state. His works left a deep impression on the judges, so that he won the award of 1888 at the age of 34.
This is the first important award in Poincare's academic career. 1888 In May, Poincare handed in his paper before the deadline of the competition, and he was declared the winner six months later. Judge Wilstrass predicted that this paper would open a new era in the history of celestial mechanics.
Mathematics and physics decathlon
From 188 1 until his death, Poincare taught at the Sorbonne University in Paris. His previous courses included physics, experimental mechanics, mathematical physics, probability theory, celestial mechanics and astronomy. An interesting episode is enough to prove Poincare's position at that time: when the minister of military and political affairs ordered the course of "useless astronomy" to be cut, Poincare said, "I'll teach this course", and officials had to shut up because no one dared to stop Poincare from offering any science courses.
Poincare has made great achievements in all fields of mathematics and physics in his life, among which the scientific discoveries named after him include Poincare sphere, Poincare map, Poincare lemma and so on. Someone once said: Shake a differential geometer and a general relativist out of their sleep and ask him what is Poincare lemma. If he can't answer, then he must be false.
It is worth pointing out that the discovery named after Poincare did not stop after his death: a crater and an asteroid on the moon were named after him.
After the three-body, Poincare joined the French Longitude Bureau in 1893 and took part in the activities of synchronizing world time. In 1897, he supported an unsuccessful suggestion, which was to decimalize arc measurement, and then decimalize time and longitude. This work made him think about how to synchronize the high-speed clocks. 1898 poincare expounded the basic principle of relativity. According to this principle, no mechanical or electromagnetic experiment can distinguish the state of uniform motion from the state of rest. In cooperation with the Dutch physicist Lorenz, he pushed time physics to the limit of explaining the behavior of fast moving electrons. The work was finally finished by Einstein.
"Dark War" Einstein
Before Einstein, physicist Lorenz and mathematician Poincare had done a lot of work in this direction, but Poincare seemed unable to accept Einstein's special theory of relativity, although their results were almost the same. Therefore, although Poincare made many speeches on relativity in his life, he never mentioned Einstein and relativity. Einstein not only did not quote Poincare's works, but also claimed that he had never read them. When ETH (Zurich Institute of Technology), Einstein's alma mater, wanted to hire Einstein as a professor, Poincare wrote a letter praising Einstein. The last paragraph is vague: "I don't think all his predictions can be verified in the future." He is engaged in so many directions that we should think that some of his research will come to a dead end. But at the same time, we hope that he will succeed in a certain direction, and a certain success is enough. "
Poincare died in 19 12. An organizer in the field of mathematics sent a letter to Einstein, saying that a collection of commemorative works would be published in memory of Poincare. Einstein took four months to reply, saying that the letter had just arrived because of the delay on the way, and it was estimated to be too late. However, the organizers did not give up. It doesn't matter if you are late, just write. So Einstein wrote back two and a half months later, saying that he really didn't have the strength to write because of his busy business, and then he dropped it.
But Einstein finally confidently affirmed Poincare's contribution to the theory of relativity in his speech 192 1. Einstein evaluated Poincare as one of the pioneers of relativity. He said: Lorenz has realized that the transformation named after him is very important for analyzing Maxwell's equations, and Poincare has further deepened this idea. ...
Honorary awards
Gold Award of the Royal Astronomical Society (1900)
Bruce Award (19 1 1 year)
name
Pangalai crater on the moon
Asteroid: 202 1 poincare
University of poincare