Henri Poincare (1854-1912) was not just one of the most inventive, versatile, and productive mathematicians of all time - he was also a leading physicist who almost won a Nobel Prize for physics and a prominent philosopher of science whose fresh and surprising essays are still in print a century lat[...]

This book is a study of how a particular vision of the unity of mathematics, often called geometric function theory, was created in the 19th century. The central focus is on the convergence of three mathematical topics: the hypergeometric and related linear differential equations, group theory, and [...]