Henri Poincare: A Scientific Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (962 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0691152713 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 608 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-07-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was not just one of the most inventive, versatile, and productive mathematicians of all time--he was also a leading physicist who almost won a Nobel Prize for physics and a prominent philosopher of science whose fresh and surprising essays are still in print a century later. Richly informed by letters and documents, Henri Poincaré demonstrates how one man's work revolutionized math, science, and the greater world.. His novel interpretation of non-Euclidean geometry challenged contemporary ideas about space, stirred heated discussion, and led to flourishing research. The first in-depth and comprehensive look at his many accomplishments, Henri Poincaré explores all the fields that Poincaré touched, the debates sparked by his original investigations, and how his discoveries still contribute to society today. In physics, his insights on the Lorentz group preceded Einstein's, and he was the first to indicate that space and time might be fundamentally atomic. Poincaré the public intellectual did not shy away from scientific controversy, and he defended mathematics against the attacks of logicians such as Bertrand Russell, opposed the views of Catholic apologists, and served as an expert witness in probability
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).
"Five Stars" according to Thomas R. Schulte. Excellent book and excellent service!. Poincare is here to stay The XX century initial years were dominated by the figure of Einstein.Poincare, mainly a mathematician, was poorly known by the science amateurs.His divulgation books are still around, which proves they are worth reading.His serious works are not so well known out the professional scientists circle,but, like good wines, they became better the more the time passes.Chaos, topology, new methods in cel. extremely wordy Amazon Customer I bought this "scientific" biography of Poincaré, eager to learn more about the man, his science, and his approach to science. Poincaré pushed in particular in France the ideas of non-Euclidean geometry, already better accepted in Germany. But Gray takes 50 (fifty) pages to explain that Poincaré pointed out that the space we feel we live in is not intrinsically Euclidean. We or
McRae, Mathemematical Reviews Clippings"Jeremy Gray has done a marvelous job of exposition and of binding together the many different cognitive, social and biographical strands into the coherent whole of a challenging, but highly rewarding, 'scientific biography'."--Klaus Hentschel, British Journal for the History of Science"A good intellectual biography of an artist should help the reader see how a particular worldview shapes the pursuit of art. This scientific biography is the first to comprehensively cover all of Poincare's main contributions to mathematics, philosophy, and physics."--Alan S. Broe