Henri Poincaré, Universal Knowledge (1854-1912, Year of Entry: 1873)

Hailed today as the "Last Universalist", Henri Poincaré was a student at École Polytechnique and walked the halls of the institution once again towards the end of his life, when he taught astrophysics from 1904 to 1908. He advanced all fields of mathematics and theoretical physics, becoming one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He created algebraic topology and other previously unexplored branches of mathematics. His main research covers the field of chaos theory and special relativity, of which he was a pioneer, as well as the philosophy of science. Henri Poincaré developed new approaches in theoretical celestial mechanics and the theory of functions of several complex variables. In 1887, he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences and later joined the Académie Française, in 1908.