THE WORK OF R. THOM

René Thom was born in Montbéliard in 1923. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1943 to 1946 and then went to the University of Strasbourg where he is now “Professeur sans Chaire”. In Strasbourg, he prepared his thesis “Espaces fibrés en sphères et carrés de Steenrod”. He presented it in Paris in 1951 in order to get the degree of Docteur ès Sciences. In 1954 his paper “Quelques propriétés globales des variétés différentiables” appeared in Comm. Math. Helvet. 28. It was prepared from his thesis. There, one finds the foundations of the theory of cobordism. Today, four years later, one can say that, for a long time, only few events have so strongly influenced Topology and, through topology, other branches of mathematics as the advent of this work…