Henri Poincare was a mathematician.
Henri Poincaré . He is often described as a polymath , and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell , since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime . 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 by Grigori Perelman .