Abstract discussion of René Thom's singularities and semiophysics with no concrete actors

flows, which led to examples of some of his universal singularities that he claimed could be found in all real physical, biological and psychological systems. For some examples: One of his archetypal singularities was a boundary at x = 0 such that the flow couldn’t spread from where it was in x>0O into x< 0 and was therefore like the border, the membrane, between the inside and outside of a cell as well as the hoped for sociopolitical functions of the Great Wall of China and the Maginot Line. If we were to blow up the boundary line from two to three dimensions, R’—R®, the straight boundary line becomes a cylinder for directionally organizing and connecting flows as in blood vessels, oil pipes, cables and wires. Since production and delivery need not occur at similar rates, temporary storage is required and may take the form of a spherical blow-up in the vertical segment of R® leading to an open bottle which may serve as a dead end storage branch of a network of connected cylinders. In the conceptual reductionism of Semiophysics, Thom said, “...life is essentially a question of embankment, canalization and the struggle to stem dispersion.” These structures of mind and world are built and maintained. Coagulation of blood is an example of a canalized fluid repairing gaps like a tubeless tire. Thom considered apparent the problem of making something from nothing, birth, that of finding the hidden sources: the bubbling spring emerges from an unseen, underground network of canalized fluid flow converging on the apparent source, birth being the invisible becoming visible. In contrast, a canalized flow emptying into lake can represent disappearance as a flow. Mathematicians from all over the world attended Thom’s 65" birthday celebration at HES. His Field’s Medal winning work on the topology of differentiable (smooth) manifolds, cobordism and related ideas, was mentioned frequently, and great homage paid to him with respect to these areas of his work. However, in two days of lectures of personal and professional tribute by the world’s great mathematicians, his work relevant to Catastrophe Theory and Semiophysics was not mentioned, even once. The form taken by mathematicians’ most severe judgments is silence. As the New York Times’ Natalie Angier’s comments indicated, this is not the time for the intuitive conduct of applied mathematics. 181 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013681