Thom was one of the first members of the mathematical school created around Henri Cartan at the end of the Sec- ond World War, and one of the most glorious, but from the start singular: provincial, born outside university circles, he had acquired very young an intimate knowledge of the differential calculus as its founders conceived it. Unusual for his time, he did not distrust geometry, where he had developed his intuition to the point of “seeing” in four dimensions. Finally, having followed Henri Cartan to Strasbourg as a young researcher in the CNRS,1 he stayed there
Publication
of the
Mathematical
Works of
René Thom
in the
Collection Documents Mathématiques
of the
French
Mathematical
Society
