Henri Poincaré, 1912–2012: Poincaré Seminar 2012 by Bertrand Duplantier, Vincent Rivasseau

By Bertrand Duplantier, Vincent Rivasseau

This 13th quantity of the Poincaré Seminar sequence, Henri Poincaré, 1912-2012, is released at the social gathering of the centennial of the loss of life of Henri Poincaré in 1912. It provides a scholarly method of Poincaré’s genius and creativity in mathematical physics and arithmetic. Its 5 articles also are hugely pedagogical, as befits their starting place in lectures to a vast medical viewers. Highlights comprise “Poincaré’s mild” by means of Olivier Darrigol, a number one historian of technology, who makes use of gentle as a guiding thread via a lot of Poincaré ’s physics and philosophy, from the applying of his more advantageous mathematical talents and the idea of diffraction to his next reflections at the foundations of electromagnetism and the electrodynamics of relocating our bodies; the authoritative “Poincaré and the Three-Body challenge” by way of Alain Chenciner, who deals an exquisitely specified, hundred-page standpoint, peppered with vibrant excerpts from citations, at the enormous paintings of Poincaré in this topic, from the recognized (King Oscar’s) 1889 memoir to the rules of the trendy conception of chaos in “Les méthodes nouvelles de los angeles mécanique céleste.” A profoundly unique and scholarly presentation of the paintings by means of Poincaré on chance conception is given by way of Laurent Mazliak in “Poincaré’s Odds,” from the incidental first visual appeal of the notice “probability” in Poincaré’s recognized 1890 theorem of recurrence for dynamical structures, to his later recognition of the unavoidability of chance calculus in technology, as built to an outstanding volume by way of Emile Borel, Poincaré’s major direct disciple; the object via Francois Béguin, “Henri Poincaré and the Uniformization of Riemann Surfaces,” takes us on a desirable trip in the course of the six successive types in twenty-six years of the distinguished uniformization theorem, which exemplifies the Master’s precise signature within the foundational fusion of arithmetic and physics, on which conformal box thought, string idea and quantum gravity rather a lot rely these days; the ultimate bankruptcy, “Harmony and Chaos, at the determine of Henri Poincaré” via the filmmaker Philippe Worms, describes the homonymous poetical movie during which eminent scientists, via mathematical scenes and actual experiments, show their emotional courting to the usually elusive clinical fact and common “harmony and chaos” in Poincaré’s legacy.

This publication can be of extensive common curiosity to physicists, mathematicians, philosophers of technology and historians.