Henri Poincaré was the brilliant mind who gave us the beginnings of chaos theory and Poincaré conjecture. He was also the doggedly persistent nut who was the last member of resistance to a twenty-four hour day and a sixty-minute hour. Let's look at his doomed quest to decimate our day.
For thousands of years, we've divided days into 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds. But why do we have to do that? Here's the story of the one gloriously failed attempt to decimalize time.