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. He received the Fields Medal in 1958.

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[edit] Biography

René Thom was born in Montbéliard, France. He was educated at Lycée Saint-Louis and École Normale Supérieure and went on to teach at Grenoble and Strasbourg.

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. 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.

René Thom died on October 25, 2002, in a small town near Paris.

[edit] Bibliography

  • "Semiophysics: A Sketch" (1990)
  • Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1972)

[edit] Reference

  • Martin Weil, French Mathematician René Thom Dies, Washington Post, November 17 (2002), p. C10

[edit] External links


Fields Medalists

1936: Ahlfors • Douglas || 1950: Schwartz • Selberg || 1954: Kodaira • Serre || 1958: Roth • Thom || 1962: Hörmander • Milnor || 1966: Atiyah • Cohen • Grothendieck • Smale || 1970: Baker • Hironaka • Novikov • Thompson || 1974: Bombieri • Mumford || 1978: Deligne • Fefferman • Margulis • Quillen || 1982: Connes • Thurston • Yau || 1986: Donaldson • Faltings • Freedman || 1990: Drinfeld • Jones • Mori • Witten || 1994: Zelmanov • Lions • Bourgain • Yoccoz || 1998: Borcherds • Gowers • Kontsevich • McMullen || 2002: Lafforgue • Voevodsky || 2006: Okounkov • Perelman • Tao • Werner
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