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Henri Poincaré

A black-and-white portrait of Henri Poincaré, wearing a suit and bow tie, with a thoughtful expression and a full beard.

French mathematician (1854–1912) whose 1890 prize-winning paper on the three-body problem contained, in passing, the first description of what would later be called chaotic dynamics. He could see the homoclinic tangle but could not draw it; the geometry was too involved for ink on paper. Most of his peers concluded that the three-body problem was simply hard. Poincaré understood it was something deeper.

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