The Henri Poincaré Prize 1997 was awarded to Maxim Kontsevich for his contributions to topological gravity, establishing a deep link between quantum gravity, string theory and the geometry of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces; to topological sigma-models on compact Kaehler manifolds; to mirror symmetry, and for the notion of quantum deformations of cohomology spaces; for the contributios to Chern-Simons theories and the construction of knot invariants; for the discovery of topological string theoretic aspects in one dimensional dynamical systems.