First Published in 2018. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

René Thom, the famous French mathematician and founder of catastrophe theory, considered linguistics an exemplary field for the application of his general morphology. It is surprising that physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists and sociologists are all engaged in the field of catastrophe theory, but that there has been almost no echo from linguistics. Meanwhile linguistics has evolved in the direction of René Thom’s intuitions about an integrated science of language and it has become a necessary task to review, update and elaborate the proposals made by Thom and to embed them in the framework of modern semantic theory.

Catastrophe Theory was introduced in the 1960s by the renowned Fields Medal mathematician René Thom as a part of the general theory of local singularities. Since then it has found applications across many areas, including biology, economics, and chemical kinetics. By investigating the phenomena of bifurcation and chaos, Catastrophe Theory proved to

In this large-format book, lavishly illustrated in color throughout, Allan McRobie takes the reader on an alluring exploration of the beautiful curves that shape our world--from our bodies to Salvador Dalí's paintings and the space-time fabric of the universe itself. The book focuses on seven curves--the fold, cusp, swallowtail, and butterfly, plus the hyperbolic, elliptical, and parabolic "umbilics"--and describes the surprising origins of their taxonomy in the catastrophe theory of mathematician René Thom.

This book surveys the work of the Second International Congress on Mathematical Education, and presents it as a picture of developing trends in mathematical education. At the end of August 1972 around 1400 people from seventy-three countries gathered for the Second International Congress on Mathematical Education in Exeter, UK. This book surveys the work of this conference, and presents it as a picture of developing trends in mathematical education. A number of themes emerged from the Congress. For example, there was great concern with the relationship between mathematics and the way in which the formation of mathematical concepts in affected by the use of language or the means in which children form the concepts from which mathematics can be drawn.