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René Thom (English)

René Thom was a French mathematician who made contributions in topology and singularity theory. He received the Fields Medal in 1958 for his work developing cobordism theory. Thom is best known for founding catastrophe theory, which analyzes how small changes in a system can lead to large-scale changes. Later in his career, he focused more on philosophy and published works reevaluating Aristotle's writings on science.

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320 views3 pages

René Thom (English)

René Thom was a French mathematician who made contributions in topology and singularity theory. He received the Fields Medal in 1958 for his work developing cobordism theory. Thom is best known for founding catastrophe theory, which analyzes how small changes in a system can lead to large-scale changes. Later in his career, he focused more on philosophy and published works reevaluating Aristotle's writings on science.

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Ren Thom

Ren Frdric Thom (French: [ne t]; 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 world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this
latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory
(later developed by Erik Christopher Zeeman). He received the Fields Medal in 1958.

Thoms lectures on the stability of dierentiable mappings, given at Bonn in 1960, were written up by Harold
Levine and published in the proceedings of a year long
symposium on singularities at Liverpool University during 1969-70, edited by Terry Wall. The proof of the
density of topologically stable mappings was completed
by John Mather in 1970, based on the ideas developed
by Thom in the previous ten years. A coherent detailed
account was published in 1976 by C. Gibson, K. Wirthmuller, E. Looijenga and A. du Plessis.

During the last twenty years of his life Thoms published


work was mainly in philosophy and epistemology, and he
undertook a reevaluation of Aristotle's writings on sciRen Thom was born in Montbliard, Doubs. He was ed- ence. In 1992, he was one of eighteen academics who
ucated at the Lyce Saint-Louis and the cole Normale sent a letter to Cambridge University protesting against
Suprieure, both in Paris. He received his PhD in 1951 plans to award Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate.
from the University of Paris. His thesis, titled Espaces Beyond Thoms contributions to algebraic topology, he
brs en sphres et carrs de Steenrod (Sphere bundles studied dierentiable mappings, through the study of
and Steenrod squares), was written under the direction generic properties.
of Henri Cartan. The foundations of cobordism theory,
for which he received the Fields Medal at Edinburgh in
1958, were already present in his thesis.
2 See also

Biography

After a fellowship in the United States, he went on to


teach at the Universities of Grenoble (19531954) and
Strasbourg (19541963), where he was appointed Professor in 1957. In 1964, he moved to the Institut des
Hautes tudes Scientiques, in Bures-sur-Yvette. He was
awarded the Brouwer Medal in 1970, the Grand Prix Scientique de la Ville de Paris in 1974, and became a Member of the Academie des Sciences of Paris in 1976.

DoldThom theorem
Quelques proprits globales des varits dierentiables
Thom isomorphism
Pontryagin-Thom construction
ThomPorteous formula

While Ren Thom is most known to the public for his


development of catastrophe theory between 1968 and
1972, his earlier work was on dierential topology. In
the early 1950s 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. From the
mid 1950s he moved into singularity theory, of which
catastrophe theory is just one aspect, and in a series of
deep (and at the time obscure) papers between 1960 and
1969 developed the theory of stratied sets and stratied
maps, proving a basic stratied isotopy theorem describing the local conical structure of Whitney stratied sets,
now known as the Thom-Mather isotopy theorem. Much
of his work on stratied sets was developed so as to understand the notion of topologically stable maps, and to eventually prove the result that the set of topologically stable
mappings between two smooth manifolds is a dense set.

3 Bibliography
Espaces brs en sphres et carrs de Steenrod,
Annales Scientiques de l'cole Normale Suprieure
(3) 69, (1952), 109182.
Thom,
Ren
(1954),
Quelques
proprits globales des varits direntiables,
Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 28: 1786,
doi:10.1007/BF02566923, MR 0061823
Ensembles et morphismes stratis, Bulletin of
the American Mathematical Society 75 (1969), 240
284.
Semio Physics: A Sketch, Addison Wesley,
(1990), ISBN 0-201-50060-4
1

5
Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, W. A. Benjamin, (1972), ISBN 0-201-40685-3.

References
Logos et Thorie des Catastrophes: partir de
loeuvre de Ren Thom, ed. Jean Petitot. Colloque
de Cerisy-la-Salle 1982 (Patio, Geneva 1996),
ISBN 9782882130105
David Aubin, "Forms of Explanations in the Catastrophe Theory of Ren 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.
Brian J. Reilly, Ren Thom, in The Columbia
History of Twentieth-Century French Thought. ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. pp. 663666.
Martin Weil, French Mathematician Ren Thom
Dies, Washington Post, November 17 (2002), p.
C10

External links
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., Ren
Thom, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive,
University of St Andrews.
Ren Thom at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Washington Post Online edition (free registration)
Meeting Ren THOM

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