René Thom, Mathematician

Permanent professor at IHES from 1963 to 1990

René Thom covered a huge area of science: starting from topology, the field of mathematics that looks at forms and deformations, he created the “mathematics of morphogenesis”, putting forward models for biology and human sciences.

René Thom’s proposals, often grouped under the name of ″catastrophe theory″, were sometimes controversial but elicited considerable interest from outside the scient­ific community. He spent the rest of his scientific life studying theoretical biology and, even more importantly, Aristotelian philosophy.

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