René Thom

René Thom
René Thom in Nice, 1970
Born	(1923-09-02)2 September 1923 Montbéliard, France
Died	25 October 2002(2002-10-25) (aged 79) Bures-sur-Yvette, France
Nationality	French
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Strasbourg Université Joseph Fourier Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure, University of Paris
Thesis	Espaces fibres en spheres et carres de Steenrod (1951)
Doctoral advisor	Henri Cartan
Doctoral students	Daniel Bennequin Marc Chaperon Marcos Sebastiani David Trotman
Known for	topology
Notable awards	Fields Medal in 1958

René Frédéric Thom (French: [ʁəne tõ]; 2 September 1923 – 25 October 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.

René Thom was born in Montbéliard, Doubs. He was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis and the École Normale Supérieure, both in Paris. He received his PhD in 1951 from the University of Paris. His thesis, titled Espaces fibrés en sphères et carrés de Steenrod (Sphere bundles and Steenrod squares), was written under the direction 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.

After a fellowship in the United States, he 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. He was awarded the Brouwer Medal in 1970, the Grand Prix Scientifique de la Ville de Paris in 1974, and became a Member of the Academie des Sciences of Paris in 1976.