  On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium
was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri
Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of
Poincar\'e. In this paper I present a personal and scientific biographical
sketch of Poincar\'e, which does not in any way reflect Poincar\'e's rich
personality and immense activity in science: When Poincar\'e traveled to parts
of Europe, Africa and America, his companions noticed that he knew well
everything from statistics to history and curious customs and habits of
peoples. He was almost teaching everything in science. He was so encyclopedic
that he dealt with the outstanding questions in the different branches of
physics and mathematics; he had altered whole fields of science such as
non-Euclidean geometry, Arithmetic, celestial mechanics, thermodynamics and
kinetic theory, optics, electrodynamics, Maxwell's theory, and other topics
from the forefront of Fin de Si\`ecle physical science. It is interesting to
note that as opposed to the prosperity of biographies and secondary papers
studying the life and scientific contributions of Albert Einstein, one finds
much less biographies and secondary sources discussing Poincar\'e's life and
work. As opposed to Einstein, Poincar\'e was not a cultural icon. Beginning in
1920 Einstein became a myth and a world famous figure. Although Poincar\'e was
so brilliant in mathematics, he mainly remained a famous mathematician within
the professional circle of scientists. He published more papers than Einstein,
performed research in many more branches of physics and mathematics, received
more prizes on his studies, and was a member of more academies in the whole
world. Despite this tremendous yield, Poincar\'e did not win the Nobel Prize.
