Friday, June 08, 2012

Poincare's hundredth death anniniversary

Dilip D'Souza reminds us that it is almost a century since Poincare died. Here is a nice article published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/notices/200509/comm-mawhin.pdf which describes his contributions including the first mention of the 'butterfly effect'. This is after he found a mistake in a prize winning paper and had to republish the paper ar his own expense which was more than the prize money. See also Poincare's cmments about earth's rotation which still seems to cause confusion in some ciecles.
Everybody has his own interpretation of Poincare's work and influence. According to Vladimir Arnold http://basepub.dauphine.fr/bitstream/handle/123456789/6842/polymathematics.PDF  (page 14)Poncare created modern mathematics and also said that 'only non-interesting problems might be formulated unambigously and solved completely'.

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