Henri Poincaré

Jules Henri Poincaré was a towering French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science often called the 'Last Universalist'—the last person capable of mastering and contributing to every field of mathematics known in his day. Educated at the École Polytechnique and École des Mines, Poincaré served as professor at the Sorbonne and was elected to the Académie des Sciences at age thirty-three.

Winning King Oscar II of Sweden's mathematical prize in 1889 for analyzing the gravitational three-body problem, Poincaré discovered that non-linear dynamical systems can exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, single-handedly founding modern chaos theory. In 1895, with his monograph Analysis Situs, he invented algebraic topology, homotopy, and the fundamental group. In 1904, he proposed the famous Poincaré conjecture regarding 3-spheres, which stood as one of the Seven Millennium Prize Problems until solved by Grigori Perelman a century later. He independently derived the Lorentz transformations and relativistic spacetime velocity additions before Einstein.