Scots-American mathematician, E. T. Bell, says, in his Men of Mathematics, that Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was "the last of the giants", which include Swiss Leonard Euler (1707-1783), German Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), British Arthur Cayley (1821-1895), Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), and a few others who contributed to so many different fields of mathematics. Among his many contributions, Poincaré founded algebraic topology and topological dynamics (in which he first noticed "chaos" in motions of the planets), initiated advances in nonlinear differential equations, formulated a "Special Theory of Relativity" a year before Einstein's "Theory", and taught us something important about language.

His sensitivity to language is evident in the fact that he is the only Frenchman to be elected both to the prestigious Academy of Science and the equally prestigious Academy of Letters. His writings on science were so readable that Parisian "shopgirls" used to carry his books to work, to read while eating lunch. Poincaré gave his daily lecture at the Sorbonne at noon so that "shopgirls" and mechanics and fishermen and other "civilians" could stand in the hall, outside the lecture room, eating their lunches while listening.

The comment that provoked my title derived from the many decades spent in trying to explain thermal activity -- why solids, liquids, and the air about us feel "cold", "cool", "hot", etc. The two most famous explanations up to the 18th century were CALORIC and PHLOGISTON -- "chemical elements", like sulphur and carbon, which were absorbed or given off during thermal change. It was Swiss Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1781), pupil of Euler, who first suggested the explanation of "molecular activity". The American Tory,Count Rumford (x-y) -- who fled to England during the American Revolution -- later noticed that boring holes in metal for cannons caused them to become very hot. And British Sir Humphrey Davey (x-y) gave a convincing demonstration of the generate of "heat from friction", by standing in a frozen swamp in midwinter while rubbing two blocks of ice together until they completely melted.

Poincaré said that scientists long explained thermal activity on "a chemical element", because a "substantive" -- namely, "heat" -- was used instead of a process-name. (And he might have said the same about optical activity, since scientists once spoke of a "chemical element" called "light".)

This admonition of Poincaré made me realize that -- to avoid such ANIMISTIC THINKING -- as if many natural processes were due to "spirits in matter" -- we should be using GERUNDS, instead of substantives or nouns to label these processes.