Henri Poincare
Henri Poincare
Jules Henri Poincaréwas a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth29 April 1854
CountryFrance
science simplicity imagine
The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
discovery important guessing
Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?
truth geometry
Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
science issues logic
Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.
men ideas example
It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. Every man has his own conception of the world, and this he cannot so easily lay aside. We must, example, use language, and our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas. Only they are unconscious preconceived ideas, which are a thousand times the most dangerous of all.
data simplicity
Analyse data just so far as to obtain simplicity and no further.
simple chance mathematics
It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.
beauty beautiful art
But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.
sole source experiments
Experiment is the sole source of truth.
business ideas clouds
Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
math numbers feelings
...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know
desire development remember
One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
knowledge math logic
There are no solved problems; there are only problems that are more or less solved.
truth knowledge science
It is by logic we prove. It is by intuition we discover.