René Thom

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René Thom (September 2, 1923 – October 25, 2002) was a French mathematician. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became celebrated for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory (later developed by Christopher Zeeman). He received the Fields Medal in 1958.

1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 References
4 External links

Biography

René Thom was born in Montbéliard, France. He was educated at Lycée Saint-Louis and École Normale Supérieure. He received his PhD in 1951 from the University of Paris. His thesis, titled Fibre spaces in spheres and Steenrod squares, was written under the direction of Henri Cartan. The foundations of cobordism theory, for which he later received the Fields Medal, were already present in his thesis.

After a fellowship in the United States, went on to teach at the Universities of Grenoble (1953-1954) and Strasbourg (1954-1963), where he was appointed Professor in 1957. In 1964, he moved to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, in Bures-sur-Yvette.

While he is most known to the public for his development of catastrophe theory between 1968 and 1972, his earlier work was on differential topology. It concerned what are now called Thom spaces, characteristic classes, cobordism theory, and the Thom transversality theorem. Another example of this line of work is the Thom conjecture, versions of which have been investigated using gauge theory. He then moved into singularity theory, of which catastrophe theory is just one aspect. Towards the end of his life he became interested in the structure of flowers and their relationship to topological manifolds.

Thom died on October 25, 2002, in Bures-sur-Yvette.

Bibliography

"Espaces fibrés en sphères et carrés de Steenrod", Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure (3) 69, (1952), 109--182.
"Quelques propriétés globales des variétés différentiables", Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 28: 17-86, 1954, MR 0061823, <http://retro.seals.ch/digbib/view?did=c1:389597&sdid=c1:389960>
"Semiophysics: A Sketch" (1990)
Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1972)

References

David Aubin, "Forms of Explanations in the Catastrophe Theory of René Thom: Topology, Morphogenesis, and Structuralism," in Growing Explanations: Historical Perspective on the Sciences of Complexity, ed. M. N. Wise, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 95-130.
Martin Weil, French Mathematician René Thom Dies, Washington Post, November 17 (2002), p. C10