admitted to having felt “oppressed” by Grothendieck’s overwhelming technical superiority. Frustrated by his incapacity to rival Grothendieck’s vertiginous output of groundbreaking ideas, Thom abandoned pure mathematics to develop catastrophe theory, a mathematical treatment that describes seven ways in which any dynamic system—be it a river, a tectonic fault or the fragile mind of a human being—can suddenly lose its equilibrium and collapse, falling into disorder and chaos.
Catastrophe theory
