Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry’s unyielding positivism (rationalism) is a characteristic setting him apart from other French writers. Nothing was more central or fundamental in Valéry's thought than his preoccupation with the methods and achievements of science, and especially of physics and mathematics. Throughout the whole of his adult life, he read widely and intensively in the field of classical physics, and studying with the greatest interest the development of mathematics from Euclid to Riemann, from Descartes to Gauss. He was excited by the remarkable advances taking place in scientific thought during his own lifetime: the gradual emergence of relativity theory, quantum theory, atomic physics and wave mechanics, and the elaboration of abstract mathematical concepts of the kind embodied in group theory, set theory, topology and n-dimensional geometry.