SYD-UNSW Joint Colloquium: Verhulst -- Life and Work of Henri Poincaré

This would be the first talk of the double-header on October 5th. 

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Speaker: Prof. Ferdinand Verhulst (University of Utrecht)
 
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~verhu101/

Time: Friday, 2-3PM, October 5, 2012

Room: OMB-149, Old Main Building (UNSW)

Lunch with speaker: meet around 12:30PM at the entrance to the East Wing 
of Red Centre Building.

One choice of commuting from Sydney: meet at Carslaw 620 around 12:05PM 
and share taxi to UNSW. The round trip is covered by school colloquium 
fund.

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Title: Life and work of Henri Poincaré
 
Abstract: Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was one of the most prolific
scientific authors of all times. Born and educated in Nancy he
showed already very young a wide interest in literature, natural
phenomena, geometry, politics and many other topics. When he was
around twenty years old, he made a definite choice for
mathematics, physics and astronomy. He pursued his education in
Paris at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. For a
brief period he was a mining engineer, but switched to a
mathematics lecturing position in Caen (Normandy) and shortly
afterwards to Paris where he taught mathematics, celestial
mechanics and mathematical physics. Already famous among
scientists, he became well-known to the general public by his
books of philosophical essays published by Flammarion.
It is remarkable that Poincaré started whole new fields: 
dynamical systems (with strong interaction between geometry and
analysis), automorphic functions, topology; he was a founder of
Special Relativity, together with Lorentz and Einstein. After
surveying his achievements, we will discuss part of his work,
in particular the Price Essay for King Oscar II which stands at
the beginning of chaos theory and in general his contributions
to dynamical systems theory.

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Joint Colloquium web site: 

http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/JointColloquium/index.html