The purpose of the present paper1 is to simplify the calculation of the Betti numbers of the simple compact Lie groups. For the unimodular group and the orthogonal group on a space of odd dimension the form of the Poincaré polynomial was correctly guessed by E. Cartan in 1929 (5, p. 183). The proof of his conjecture and its extension to the four classes of classical groups was given by L. Pontrjagin (13) using topological arguments and then by R. Brauer (2) using algebraic methods.