Major Prophets of To-Day

by Edwin E. Slosson

"You did not delay revealing your vocation and will be justly cited as the most precocious of infant prodigies. You were nine months old when for the first time as night came your eyes were directed toward the sky. You saw there a star light up. You persistently pointed it out to your mother, who was also your nurse. Then you discovered another with some astonishment, and your reason cried 'Enco lo la bas!' A third, a fourth, more cries of joy and equal enthusiasm. You had to be put to bed because you became so excited discovering stars. That evening was your first contact with the infinite, and you had inaugurated your courses in astronomy, the youngest professor known."

Henri Poincaré was born April 29, 1854, at Nancy, where his ancestors had long been established. His grandfather was a pharmacist and his father a physician of more than usual scholarship. The name, he said, was originally Pontcaré, for, one can imagine a square bridge but not a square point. But the philologists who took the question up discovered in the register of the university a student named "Petrus Pugniquadrati" in 1403 and "Jehan Poing-quarré" in 1418, so the name Poincaré meant "clenched-fist." His cousin, Raymond Poincaré, son of a distinguished engineer, has long been one of the most prominent figures in the political world, a member of the Academy, senator, minister, and is now president of the French republic.

In the Nancy lycée he led all his classes and showed a special aptitude for history and literature. At the age of thirteen he composed a five-act tragedy in verse, and since he was a Lorrainer, the heroine was of course Jeanne d'Arc. But as soon as he caught sight of a geometry, his true vocation became apparent. His instructor ran to his home and announced to his mother: "Madame, your son will be a mathematician."

Passing through the Polytechnic School he entered the National School of Mines, and for a few years after graduation he served as engineer in the Government departments of mines and railroads. At the age of twenty-seven he was called to a chair of mathematics in the University of Paris, where he remained, also filling the positions of Professor of Astronomy in the Polytechnic School and Professor of Theoretical Electricity in the Professional School of Posts and Telegraphs. He was received into the Academy of Sciences at the early age of thirty-two, and at the time of his election to the French Academy he had been honored by election to membership by thirty-five foreign academies. He took his seat in the Académie française very appropriately as the successor of Sully-Prudhomme, who likewise was an engineer by profession and a philosopher by temperament. To Poincaré as well as to Sully-Prudhomme, science appealed to the æsthetic sense as a thing of beauty and an inspiration to the imagination.

He married at the age of twenty-seven and had four children, three daughters and a son. His younger sister is the wife of the philosopher, Émile Boutroux, well known in this country from the lectures he gave at Harvard and Princeton.

Poincaré was influential in introducing improved methods in teaching mathematics, promoting the use of natural and dynamical methods instead of the abstract and static methods of Euclid and Legendre. He was skeptical in regard to religion and indifferent to politics. When called upon to contribute to a symposium on the old question of the scholar in politics,[7] he responded that savants like all citizens ought to interest themselves in the affairs of the country. But politics has become a profession, and a savant who entered into it would have to devote half his time to public business if he would be useful and the other half to his constituents if he wished to keep his seat, so he would have no time for science.

When asked for his opinion on woman suffrage,[8] he replied as follows:

I see no theoretical reason for refusing the political suffrage to women, married or not. They pay taxes the same as men, and they contribute their sons, so it is even heavier upon them than upon men. Perhaps woman suffrage is the sole means of combating alcoholism. I fear only the clerical influence over women.

Of the achievements that have given M. Poincaré his world-wide fame I am not competent to speak. Readers who would know the significance and value of his work on fuchsian, hyper-fuchsian, theta-fuchsian, abelian, and elliptical functions must go further for the information. I can only quote the opinions of those most competent to express an opinion as to his contributions to science. In 1905 he received the Bolyai Prize of ten thousand crowns, which is awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences every five years for the best work in mathematics done during that period. The official report by Gustave Rados begins as follows:

"Henri Poincaré is incontestably the first and most powerful investigator of the present time in the domain of mathematics and mathematical physics. His strongly marked individuality permits us to recognize in him a savant endowed with intuition, who knows how to draw from the exhaustless well of geometrical and mechanical intuitions the elements and the origins of his profound and penetrating researches, yet using besides the most admirable logical power in working out his conceptions. In addition to his brilliant inventive genius we must recognize in him an ability for the finest and most fruitful generalizations of mathematical relations, which has often enabled him to push back, far beyond the point where others have hitherto been stopped, the limits of our knowledge in different branches of pure and applied mathematics. This was shown already in his first work on automorphic functions with which he began the series of his brilliant publications which must be classed with the greatest mathematical discoveries of all time."