- published: 21 Jun 2011
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François Burgat, a political scientist and arabist, is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research; since May 2008 he has been the head of the French Institute of the Near East.
He has lectured for, and given expert advice, to a wide range of academic institutions such as the World Economic Forum, NATO, and major private or public think tanks across the world. He has been a permanent resident in the Middle East for over 18 years: at the University of Constantine, Algeria (1973-1980), at the CEDEJ in Cairo (1989-1993), then as the director of the French Centre for Archaeology and Social Sciences in Sana'a, Yemen (1997-2003), and at the IREMAM (Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman) in Aix-en-Provence (2003-2008).
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.