POINCARÉ'S PEAR-SHAPE

POINCARÉ, H.

Sur l'équilibre d'une masse fluide animée d'un mouvement de rotation.

(Stockholm, Beijer), 1885. 4to. As extracted from "Acta Mathematica, 21. Band]. No backstrip. Fine and clean. Pp. 259-380.

First printing of Poincaré's famous paper in which he proved that a rotating fluid such as a star changed its shape from a sphere to an ellipsoid to a pear-shape before breaking into two unequal portions.

"This work, which contained the discovery of new, pear-shaped figures of equilibrium, aroused considerable attention because of its important implications for cosmogony in relation to the evolution of binary stars and other celestial bodies." (The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, P. 786)

Another famous paper of Poincaré in celestial mechanics is the one he wrote in 1885 on the shape of a rotating fluid mass submitted only to the forces of gravitation. Maclaurin had found as possible shapes some ellipsoids of revolution to which Jacobi had added other types of ellipsoids with unequal axes, and P. G. Tait and W. Thomson some annular shapes. By a penetrating analysis of the problem, Poincaré showed that still other "pyriform" shapes existed. One of the features of his interesting argument is that, apparently for the first time, he was confronted with the problem of minimizing a quadratic form in "infinitely" many variables." (DSB)

Order-nr.: 45787