René Thom (September 2, 1923 - October 25, 2002) was a French mathematician and founder of the catastrophe theory. He received the Fields Medal in 1958. September 2 is the 245th day of the year (246th in leap years). ... 1923 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... October 25 is the 298th day of the year (299th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 67 days remaining. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A mathematician is a person whose area of study and research is mathematics. ... Catastrophe theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with dynamical systems and looks at situations in which a small change in a control parameter can lead to a large change in behavior. ... The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to up to four mathematicians (not over forty years of age) at each International Congress of International Mathematical Union, since 1936 and regularly since 1948 at the initiative of the Canadian mathematican John Charles Fields. ...

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. Montbéliard (German Mömpelgard) is a commune in the Doubs département, in eastern France. ... The quadrangle at the main ENS building on rue dUlm is known as the Cour aux Ernests – the Ernests being the goldfish in the pond. ... View of Grenoble, 2002, with the snowy peaks of the Dauphiné Alps Location within France Grenoble ( Occitan: Grasanòbol) is a city and commune in south-east France, situated at the foot of the Alps, at the confluence of the Drac into the Isère River. ... City motto: – City proper (commune) Région Alsace Département Bas-Rhin (67) Mayor Fabienne Keller (UMP) (since 2001) Area 78. ...

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. 1968 was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... 1972 was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ... In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with differentiable functions on differentiable manifolds. ... In mathematics, the Thom space or Thom complex of algebraic topology and differential topology is a topological space associated to a vector bundle, over any paracompact space. ... In mathematics, the idea of characteristic class is one of the unifying geometric concepts in algebraic topology, differential geometry and algebraic geometry. ... In mathematics, cobordism is a relation between manifolds, based on the idea of boundary. ... For non-mathematical singularity theories, see singularity. ...

René Thom died on October 25, 2002, in a small town near Paris. October 25 is the 298th day of the year (299th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 67 days remaining. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ...

Bibliography

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

Reference

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

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External links

• Biography (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Thom.html) at the MacTutor archive
• Washington Post Online edition (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64970-2002Nov16.html) (free registration)