Soon after, he was offered a post as junior lecturer in mathematics at
Caen University, but he never fully abandoned his mining career to mathematics. He worked at the Ministry of Public Services as an engineer in charge of northern railway development from 1881 to 1885. He eventually became chief engineer of the Corps de Mines in 1893 and inspector general in 1910.
Beginning in 1881 and for the rest of his career, he taught at the
University of Paris (the
Sorbonne). He was initially appointed as the
maître de conférences d'analyse (associate professor of analysis) (Sageret, 1911). Eventually, he held the chairs of Physical and Experimental Mechanics, Mathematical Physics and Theory of Probability, and Celestial Mechanics and Astronomy.
Also in that same year, Poincaré married Miss Poulain d'Andecy. Together they had four children: Jeanne (born 1887), Yvonne (born 1889), Henriette (born 1891), and Léon (born 1893).
In 1887, at the young age of 32, Poincaré was elected to the
French Academy of Sciences. He became its president in 1906, and was elected to the
Académie française in 1909.
In 1887 he won
Oscar II, King of Sweden's mathematical competition for a resolution of the
three-body problem concerning the free motion of multiple orbiting bodies. (See
#The three-body problem section below)
In 1893 Poincaré joined the French
Bureau des Longitudes, which engaged him in the synchronisation of time around the world. In 1897 Poincaré backed an unsuccessful proposal for the decimalisation of circular measure, and hence time and
longitude (see Galison 2003). It was this post which led him to consider the question of establishing international time zones and the synchronisation of time between bodies in relative motion. (See
#Work on Relativity section below)
In 1899, and again more successfully in 1904, he intervened in the trials of
Alfred Dreyfus. He attacked the spurious scientific claims of some of the evidence brought against Dreyfus, who was a Jewish officer in the French army charged with treason by anti-Semitic colleagues.
In 1912 Poincaré underwent surgery for a
prostate problem and subsequently died from an
embolism on
July 17, 1912, in Paris. He was aged 58. He is buried in the Poincaré family vault in the
Cemetery of Montparnasse, Paris.
The French Minister of Education,
Claude Allegre, has recently (2004) proposed that Poincaré be reburied in the
Panthéon in Paris, which is reserved for French citizens only of the highest honour.