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Picasso & his circle were introduced to math of the 4th dimension & Non-Euclidian geometry by actuary friend Princet, who gave him the book 'Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions' (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions) by Jouffret, a popularization of Poincaré's 'La Science et l'Hypothèse' (Science and Hypothesis). Jouffret's book includes many diagrams of 4D objects like hypercubes projected on 2D surface of a page.

Princet also spoke to Picasso about the work of polymath Poincaré. Picasso realized that this approach to 4D geometry captured how he wanted to depict two points of view simultaneously & art historians can trace the influence of this geometry in his earliest Cubist paintings. So I have made a Cubist style portrait of mathematician, physicist, engineer and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré (1854-1912).

Pointcaré was called "The Last Universalist" since he excelled in such a wide range of math including pure & applied math, mathematical physics & celestial mechanics. He was 1st to discover a deterministic system which exhibits chaos in the 3-body problem (how a system of 3 masses behave under gravity). The 3 circular shapes in the background allude to the 3-body problem & the spiral is a hint at the chaos in the trajectories.

He is considered a founder of the study of topology, wrote the Lorentz transformations for special relativity in their modern form, discovered the Lorentz transformations for velocity & the invariance of Maxwell's equations & proposed gravitational waves.

Poincaré himself worked quite intuitively & wrote, "It is only through science and art that civilization is of value."