Henri Poincaré, in spite of his fame, is regularly considered to be an undervalued scientific thinker, given that it took close to a century for some of his ideas to be appreciated. He was perhaps the last great thinking mathematician (or possibly the reverse, a mathematical thinker). Every time I see a T-shirt bearing the picture of the modern icon Albert Einstein, I cannot help thinking of Poincaré—Einstein is worthy of our reverence, but he has displaced many others. There is so little room in our consciousness; it is winner-take-all up there.
