René Thom

René Frédéric Thom was a French mathematician, born on 2 September 1923, who died on 25 October 2002 and who received the Fields Medal in 1958 for the foundations of cobordism theory. He grew up in Montbéliard, studied at the École Normale Supérieure and received his PhD in 1951 from the University of Paris under the direction of Henri Cartan, with a thesis on sphere bundles and Steenrod squares. He made his reputation as a topologist, introducing Thom spaces and the Thom transversality theorem and developing the theory of stratified sets, and he became world famous as the founder of catastrophe theory, later developed by Christopher Zeeman. He worked at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1964 until 1990.