Rene Thom Quotes

Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations.

If one must choose between rigour and meaning, I shall unhesitatingly choose the latter.

The world of ideas is not revealed to us in one stroke; we must both permanently and unceasingly recreate it in our consciousness.

I believe that proving is not a natural activity for mathematicians.

Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global.

The purely formal language of geometry describes adequately the reality of space. We might say, in this sense, that geometry is successful magic. I should like to state a converse: is not all magic, to the extent that it is successful, geometry?

Quantum mechanics, with its leap into statistics, has been a mere palliative for our ignorance

Algebra is rich in structure but weak in meaning.

All models divide naturally...into two a priori parts: one is kinematics, whose aim is to parameterize the forms of the states of the process under consideration, and the other is dynamics, describing the evolution in time of these forms.

The importance of the "New Mathematics" lies mainly in the fact that it has taught us the difference between the disc and the circle.

At a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not desirable that some, who can, dream ?