6-1-1888. H. Poincaré à George Sarton

[Ca. May, 1912]

Monsieur,

Il m’est malheureusement impossible de collaborer activement à votre revue; je ne pourrais donc vous donner qu’un appui purement moral.

Si vous voulez bien vous en contenter, je ne vous le refuserai pas.

Votre bien dévoué,

Poincaré

ALS 1p. George Sarton additional papers, Box 20, bMS Am 1803 (1147), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Time-stamp: "23.10.2025 19:57"

Notes

• 1 When Sarton launched the journal Isis in Ghent in May, 1913, he listed Poincaré as a member of the Patronage Committee, alongside thirty-three others, including Svante Arrhenius, Wilhelm Ostwald, William Ramsay, and H.-G. Zeuthen. Poincaré was the only deceased member of this committee, and the only physicist, which prompted Sarton to solicit H.A. Lorentz to take his place; see Sarton to Lorentz, 2 May, 1913, Lorentz Papers, Noord-Hollands Archief. Sarton sent Lorentz the first issue of Isis, which features a photographic portrait of Poincaré as frontispiece, along with a short obituary (Sarton, 1913c). The photo was provided by Poincaré’s widow, and had accompanied Sarton’s extended obituary of Poincaré in the journal Ciel et terre (Sarton, 1913a, b). Other francophone scholars contacted by Sarton rejected his request for moral support, including Pierre Duhem, Paul Mansion and Henri Bergson. Abel Rey, however, signaled his agreement (Pyenson, 2007, 170). The phrasing “je ne le refuserai pas” likely recalled for Sarton Poincaré’s refusal, around 1910, to take him on as an assistant (Pyenson, 2007, 95).