Poincaré's Argumentative Essay

Poincaré, known in his lifetime for his mathematical talents and layman-accessible literature, as well as being known for his polymath abilities, is now known more, as Mauro Murzi says, for his “conventionalism, against formalism, against logicism...against Cantor's treating his new infinite sets as being independent of human thinking,” (Murzi, Mauro).

So, one of the unusual aspects of Poincaré’s scientific and mathematical reasonings was his integration of philosophy and science. His ideas were both criticized, and loved.

Poincaré’s works of literature on science often shied away from the idea that a single idea could express the whole. For example, as his wrote, “Absolute space, that is to say, the point to which it would be necessary to refer the Earth to know whether it really

moves, has no objective existence. The two propositions: “The Earth turns round” and “It is more convenient to suppose the Earth turns round” have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other,”(Mawhin, Jean).

Because Poincaré became, according to Mauro Murzi, the “first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system,”

In fact, Poincaré, along with has been called one of the originators of the theory of relativity. “Edmund Taylor Whittaker, in his 1953 book "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity," argues that Poincaré and Lorentz were the originators of the theory of relativity, not Einstein. Whittaker refers to Einstein's famous theory as the "Poincaré-Lorentz theory of relativity." While investigating relativity, Poincaré never arrived at the space-time continuum that was central to Einstein's theory of special relativity. Had Poincaré discovered and included the inseparable relationship between space and time, it is possible that he would have been credited as the originator of the theory rather than