Mathematician:René Frédéric Thom
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Mathematician
French mathematician who worked as a topologist, then moved on to aspects of what would later be called singularity theory.
One of the founders of catastrophe theory.
Introduced the concept of cobordism.
Fields Medal
René Frédéric Thom was awarded a Fields Medal in $\text {1958}$ at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom:
- For creating the theory of 'Cobordisme' which has, within the few years of its existence, led to the most penetrating insight into the topology of differentiable manifolds.
Nationality
French
History
- Born: 2 September 1923 in Montbéliard, Doubs, France
- Died: 25 October 2002 in Bures-sur-Yvette, France
Theorems and Definitions
- Dold-Thom Theorem (with Albrecht Dold)
- Pontryagin-Thom Construction (with Lev Semyonovich Pontryagin)
- Giambelli-Thom-Porteous Formula (with Giovanni Zeno Giambelli and Ian Robertson Porteous)
Publications
- 1952: Espaces fibrés en sphères et carrés de Steenrod (Ann. Sci. École Norm. Sup. Ser. 3 Vol. 69: pp. 109 – 182)
- 1954: Quelques propriétés globales des variétés différentiables (Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici Vol. 28: pp. 17 – 86)
- 1969: Ensembles et morphismes stratifiés (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Vol. 75: pp. 240 – 284)
- 1972: Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse ("Structural Stability and Morphogenesis")
- 1990: Semio Physics: A Sketch
Sources
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "René Frédéric Thom": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- 1998: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (2nd ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Thom, René Frédéric (1923- )
- 2008: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (4th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Thom, René Frédéric (1923-2002)
- 2014: Christopher Clapham and James Nicholson: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics (5th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Thom, René Frédéric (1923-2002)