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.