3-34-1. Norman Lockyer to H. Poincaré

Monday — Jany 26^th [1892]

Nature — Publishing Office: Bedford Street, Strand, London

My dear Sir,

I have had a translation made of your admirable article on non-Euclidean Geometry & I shall be obliged if you will kindly look it over before it appears.¹¹endnote: ¹ Poincaré (1892), translated by W. J. L., and published on 25.02.1892. Lockyer most likely asked his wife, Winifred James Lockyer, to translate Poincaré’s essay. Mrs. Lockyer had previously translated from the French Amédée Guillemin’s popular treatise The Applications of Physical Forces (1877). Poincaré’s essay originally appeared in the Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées (Poincaré 1891). It advanced his conventionalist philosophy of geometry, according to which geometry is an abstract science, and the geometry of physical space is less a matter of experiment than of convenience. For an overview, see (Walter 2008, 2009).

I am sorry to say that Sylvester is far from well.²²endnote: ² J. J. Sylvester; for his correspondence with Poincaré, see Nabonnand et al., Volume 4.

Very sincerely yours,

J. Norman Lockyer

ALS 1p. Private collection, Paris 75017.

Time-stamp: " 4.05.2019 00:12"

Notes

1 Poincaré (1892), translated by W. J. L., and published on 25.02.1892. Lockyer most likely asked his wife, Winifred James Lockyer, to translate Poincaré’s essay. Mrs. Lockyer had previously translated from the French Amédée Guillemin’s popular treatise The Applications of Physical Forces (1877). Poincaré’s essay originally appeared in the Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées (Poincaré 1891). It advanced his conventionalist philosophy of geometry, according to which geometry is an abstract science, and the geometry of physical space is less a matter of experiment than of convenience. For an overview, see (Walter 2008, 2009).
2 J. J. Sylvester; for his correspondence with Poincaré, see Nabonnand et al., Volume 4.

References

A. Guillemin (1877) The Applications of Physical Forces. Macmillan, London. link1 Cited by: endnote 1.
M. Heidelberger and G. Schiemann (Eds.) (2009) The Significance of the Hypothetical in the Natural Sciences. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Cited by: S. A. Walter (2009).
H. Poincaré (1891) Les géométries non euclidiennes. Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 2, pp. 769–774. link1 Cited by: endnote 1.
H. Poincaré (1892) Non-Euclidian geometry. Nature 45, pp. 404–407. link1 Cited by: endnote 1.
I. Smadja (Ed.) (2008) Réalisme et théories physiques. Presses universitaires de Caen, Caen. link2 Cited by: S. A. Walter (2008).
S. A. Walter (2008) Henri Poincaré et l’espace-temps conventionnel. See Réalisme et théories physiques, Smadja, Cahiers de philosophie de l’université de Caen, Vol. 45, pp. 87–119. link1, link2 Cited by: endnote 1.
S. A. Walter (2009) Hypothesis and convention in Poincaré’s defense of Galilei spacetime. See The Significance of the Hypothetical in the Natural Sciences, Heidelberger and Schiemann, pp. 193–219. link1 Cited by: endnote 1.