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Topology and biology: From Aristotle to Thom
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TOPOLOGY AND BIOLOGY: FROM ARISTOTLE TO
THOM
ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS
Abstract. René Thom discovered several refined topological notions

in the writings of Aristotle, especially the biological. More generally, he
arXiv:1811.09090v1 [math.HO] 22 Nov 2018
considered that some of the assertions of the Greek philosophers have a

definite topological content, even if they were written 2400 years before
the field of topology was born. In this article, we expand on these ideas
of Thom. At the same time, we highlight the importance of biology in
the works of Aristotle and Thom and we report on their conception of
mathematics and more generally on science.
The final version of this article will appear in the book Geometry in
history (ed. S. G. Dani and A. Papadopoulos), Springer Verlag, 2019.
AMS classification: 03A05, 01-02, 01A20, 34-02, 34-03, 54-03, 00A30,

92B99.
Keywords: Mathematics in Aristotle, topology in Aristotle, form, mor-
phology, mathematics in biology, René Thom, morphogenesis, hylemorphism,
stratification, Stokes formula, history of topology.
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. D’Arcy Thompson 6
3. Aristotle, mathematician and topologist 8
4. Thom on Aristotle 17
5. On form 27
References 33
1. Introduction
Bourbaki, in his Éléments d’histoire des mathématiques, at the beginning
of the chapter on topological spaces, writes ([16, p. 175]):
The notions of limit and continuity date back to antiquity; one
cannot make their complete history without studying systemati-
cally, from this point of view, not only the mathematicians, but
also the Greek philosophers, and in particular Aristotle, and with-
out tracing the evolution of these ideas through the mathematics
of the Renaissance and the beginning of differential and integral
Date: November 26, 2018.

1
2 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS
calculus. Such a study, which would be interesting to carry on,

would have to go much beyond the frame of the present note.1
The reference in this quote is to “Greek philosophers” rather than “Greek
mathematicians.” One may recall in this respect that at that time, math-
ematics was closely related to philosophy, even though there was a clear
distinction between the two subjects. Many mathematicians were often
philosophers and vice-versa, and mathematics was taught at the philosoph-
ical schools. A prominent example is Plato who, in his Academy, was es-
sentially teaching mathematics. We may recall here a note by Aristoxenus,
the famous 4th century BCE music theorist who, reporting on the teaching
of Plato, writes that the latter used to entice his audience by announcing
lectures on the Good or similar philosophical topics, but that eventually the
lectures turned out to be on geometry, number theory or astronomy, with
the conclusion that “the Good is One” [15, p. 98]. Aristotle was educated at
Plato’s academy, where he spent twenty years, learning mathematics in the
pure Pythagorean tradition, and he was one of the best students there—
Plato used to call him “the Brain of the School”—. This is important to
keep in mind, since Aristotle’s mathematical side, which is the main topic
of the present article, is usually neglected.
Over half a century since Bourbaki’s statement, a systematic investigation
of traces of topology in the works of the philosophers of Greek antiquity has
not been conducted yet. One problem for realizing such a program is that
the ancient Greek texts that survive are generally analyzed and commented
on by specialists in philosophy or ancient languages with little knowledge of
mathematics, especially when it comes to topology, a field where detecting
the important ideas requires a familiarity with this topic. In particular,
it happens sometimes that the translation of terms conveying topological
ideas do not render faithfully their content; this is the well-known problem
of mathematical texts translated by non-mathematicians.
Thom offers a rare, even unique, and important exception. He spent a
great deal of his time reading (in Greek) the works of Aristotle and detecting
the topological ideas they contain. He also corrected a number of mistakes
in the existing translations and proposed more precise ones. In his 1991 ar-
ticle Matière, forme et catastrophes [43, p. 367], he declares that his past as
a mathematician and initiator of catastrophe theory probably confers upon
him a certain capacity of noticing in the work of Aristotle aspects that a
traditional philosophical training would have put aside. He writes in his
article Les intuitions topologiques primordiales de l’aristotélisme [40] (1988)
that the earliest terms of Greek topology available in the Greek literature
are contained in Parmenides’ poem, On Nature. He notes, in particular,
that the word sunekhes (συνεχές) which appears there is usually translated
1“Les notions de limite et de continuité remontent à l’antiquité ; on ne saurait en faire

une histoire complète sans étudier systématiquement de ce point de vue, non seulement
les mathématiciens, mais aussi les philosophes grecs et en particulier Aristote, ni non plus
sans poursuivre l’évolution de ces idées à travers les mathématiques de la Renaissance et
les débuts du calcul différentiel et intégral. Une telle étude, qu’il serait certes intéressant
d’entreprendre, dépasserait de beaucoup le cadre de cette note.” [For all the translations
that are mine, I have included the French text in footnote.]
TOPOLOGY AND BIOLOGY 3
by continuous, which is a mistake, because this word rather refers to (arc-

wise) connectedness. In order to make such a comment, and, especially given
that no precise topological terminology existed in antiquity, a definite under-
standing of the topological ideas and intuitions involved together with their
equivalent in modern language is required. There are many other examples
of remarks of the same kind by Thom, and we shall note a few of them later
in the text. Thanks to Thom’s translation and interpretation of Aristotle
and of other Greek philosophers, certain passages that were obscure sud-
denly become clearer and more understandable for a mathematician. This
is one of the themes that we develop in this article.
In several of his works, Thom expressed his respect for the philosophers
of Greek antiquity. He started to quote them extensively in his books and
articles that he wrote in the beginning of the 1960s, a time when his math-
ematical work became part of a broader inquiry that included biology and
philosophy. In the first book he published, Stabilité structurelle et mor-
phogenèse : Essai d’une théorie générale des modèles, written in the period
1964–1968, he writes [33, p. 9]:2
If I have quoted the aphorisms of Heraclitus at the beginning of
some chapters, the reason is that nothing else could be better
adapted to this type of study. In fact, all the basic intuitive ideas of
morphogenesis can be found in Heraclitus: all that I have done is to
place these in a geometric and dynamic framework that will make
them some day accessible to quantitative analysis. The “solemn,
unadorned words,”3 like those of the sibyl that have sounded with-
out faltering throughout the centuries, deserve this distant echo.
Aristotle, to whom Thom referred constantly in his later works, placed
biology and morphology at the basis of almost every field of human knowl-
edge, including physics, psychology, law and politics. Topology is involved,
often implicitly but also explicitly, at several places in his writings. Bour-
baki, in the passage cited at the beginning of this article, talks about limits
and continuity, but Thom highlighted many other fundamental topological
questions in the works of the Stagirite. Among them is the central prob-
lem of topology, namely, that of reconstructing the global from the local.
He noted that Aristotle saw that this problem, which he considered mainly
from a morphological point of view, is solved in nature, especially in the
vegetal world, where one can reconstruct a plant from a piece of it. Even
in the animal world, where this phenomenon is exceptional—in general, one
cannot resurrect an animal from one of its parts—he saw that if we ampu-
tate certain mollusks, crustaceans and insects of one of their organs, they
can regenerate it. Most especially, Aristotle understood that it is possible
to split certain eggs to obtain several individuals.
In the foreword to his Esquisse d’une sémiophysique, a book published
in 1988, which carries the subtitle Physique aristotélicienne et théorie des
2We quote from the English translation, Structural stability and morphogenesis. An
outline of a general theory of models published in 1975.
3Thom quotes here Heraclitus, Fragment No. 12: “And the Sibyl with raving mouth,
uttering words solemn, unadorned, and unsweetened, reaches with her voice a thousand
years because of the god in her.” (Transl. A. Fairbanks, In: The First Philosophers of
Greece, Scribner, 1898).
catastrophes,4 Thom writes [42, p. viii]:5 “It was only quite recently, almost
by chance, that I discovered the work of Aristotle. It was fascinating reading,
almost from the start.” More than a source of inspiration, Thom found in
the writings of the Stagirite a confirmation of his own ideas. At several
occasions, he expressed his surprise to see in these writings statements that
he himself had came up with, in slightly different terms, without being
aware of their existence. He declares in his 1991 article Matière, forme
et catastrophes [43, p. 367]: “In the last years, in view of my writing of
the Semiophysics, I was led to go more thoroughly into the knowledge of
the work of the Stagirite.”6 He found in that work the idea that, because we
cannot understand everything in nature, we should concentrate our efforts on
stable and generic phenomena. Aristotle formulated the difference between
a generic and a non-generic phenomenon as a difference between a “natural
phenomenon” and an “accident.” Interpreting this idea (and related ones)
in terms of modern topology is one of the epistemological contributions of
Thom. He writes in his Esquisse [42, p. 12] (p. ix of the English translation):
[. . . ] If I add that I found in Aristotle the concept of genericity
(ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ), the idea of stratification as it might be glimpsed
in the decomposition of the organism into homeomerous and an-
homeomerous parts by Aristotle the biologist, and the idea of the
breaking down of the genus into species as images of bifurcation,
it will be agreed that there was matter for some astonishment.
The notion of “homeomerous” (ὁμοιομερής), to which Thom refers in this
passage, occurs in Aristotle’s History of animals, his Parts of animals, and
in other zoological writings. It contains the idea of self-similarity that ap-
pears in mathematics. Among the other topological ideas that Thom found
in Aristotle’s writings are those of open and closed set, of cobordism, and
the Stokes formula. We shall quote the explicit passages below. This Aris-
totelian view of mathematics, shared by Thom, tells us in particular that
mathematics emerges from our daily concepts, rather than exists is some
Platonist ideal realm.
Thom published several articles on topology in Aristotle, including Les in-
tuitions topologiques primordiales de l’aristotélisme (The primary intuitions
of Aristotelianism) [40] (1988) which is an expanded version of a section
in Chapter 7 of the Esquisse, Matière, forme et catastrophes (Matter, form
and catastrophes) [43] (1991), an article published in the proceedings of a
conference held at the Unesco headquarters in Paris at the occasion of the
23rd centenary of the Philosopher, Aristote topologue (Aristotle as a topol-
ogist) [47] (1999) and others. It comes out from Thom’s articles that even
though Aristotle did not build any topological theory in the purely mathe-
matical sense, topological intuitions are found throughout his works. Thom
writes in [40, p. 395]: “We shall not find these intuitions in explicit theses
4We quote from the English translation published in 1990 under the title Semio Physics:
A Sketch, with the subtitle Aristotelian Physics and Catastrophe Theory.
5Page numbers refer to the English translation.
6Ces dernières années, en vue de la rédaction de ma Sémiophysique, j’ai dû entrer plus
profondément dans la connaissance de l’œuvre du Stagirite.
and constructions of the theory. We shall find them mostly in some ‘small
sentences’ that illuminate the whole corpus with their brilliant concision.”7
Thom considered that mathematics is a language that is adequate for phi-
losophy. he expressed this is several papers, and in particular in the article
Logos phenix [35] and others that are reprinted in the collection Modèles
mathématiques de la morphogenèse [36]. In fact, beyond the discussion that
we have here concerning topological notions, the question of how much philo-
sophical notions carrying a mathematical name (infinity, limit, continuity,
etc.) differ from their mathematical counterparts is debatable. Indeed, one
may argue that mathematics needs precise terms and formal definitions.
Such a position is expressed by Plotnitsky, who writes in his essay published
in the present volume [26]:
What made topology a mathematical discipline is that one can as-
sociate algebraic structures (initially numbers, eventually groups
and other abstract algebraic structures, such as rings) to the ar-
chitecture of spatial objects that are invariant under continuous
transformations, independently of their geometrical properties.
Plotnitsky also quotes Hermann Weyl from his book The continuum [50],
where the latter says that the concepts offered to us by the intuitive notion of
continuum cannot be identified with those that mathematics presents to us.
Thom had a different point of view. For him, mathematics and our intuition
of the real world are strongly intermingled. In the article Logos phenix [36,
p. 292], he writes: “How can we explain that mathematics represents the real
world? The answer, I think is offered to us by the intuition of the continu-
ous”8 For him, it is the geometrical notion of continuous that gives a meaning
to beings that would have needed infinitely many actions. He mentions the
paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise that allows us to give a meaning to the
infinite sum 1/2+1/4+1/8+... Here, he writes, “infinite becomes seizable
in action.”9 Conversely, he says, the introduction of a continuous underly-
ing substrate allows us to explain the significant—non-trivial—character of
many mathematical theorems [36, p. 293].
Beyond philosophy, Thom used the mathematics that he developed in
order to express natural phenomena. At several occasions, he insisted on
the fact that the mathematical concepts need not be formalized or rigorously
expressed in order to exist. He recalls in [14] that “rigor” is a latin word that
reminds him of the sentence rigor mortis (the rigor of a dead body). He
writes that rigor is “a very unnecessary quality in mathematical thinking.” In
his article [39], he declares that anything which is rigorous is not significant.10
Our aim in the next few pages is to expand on these ideas. A collection
of essays on the Thom and his work appeared in print recently, [25].
7Ces intuitions, on ne les trouvera pas dans les thèses et les constructions explicites de
la théorie. On les trouvera surtout dans quelques “petites phrases”, qui illuminent tout le
corpus de leur éclatante concision.
8Comment expliquer que les mathématiques représentent le réel ? La réponse, je crois,
nous est offerte par l’intuition du continu.”
9L’infini devient saisissable en acte.
10Tout ce qui est rigoureux est insignifiant.
2. D’Arcy Thompson
Before talking more thoroughly about Aristotle and Thom, I would like
to say a few words on the mathematician, biologist and philosopher who, in
many ways, stands between them, namely, D’Arcy Thompson.11 At several
occasions, Thom referred to the latter’s book On growth and form (1917), a
frequently quoted work whose main object is the existence of mathematical
models for growth and form in animal and vegetable biology at the level
of cells, tissues and other parts of a living organism. D’Arcy Thompson
emphasized the striking analogies between the mathematical patterns that
describe all these parts, searching for general laws based on these patterns.
In reading On growth and form, Thom had the same reaction he had when
he read Aristotle: he was amazed by the richness of the ideas contained
in it, and by their closeness to his own ideas. In turn, Thompson had a
boundless admiration for Aristotle who had placed biology at the center of
his investigations. In an article titled On Aristotle as biologist, Thompson
calls the latter “the great biologist of Antiquity, who is maestro di color che
sanno,12 in the science as in so many other departments of knowledge.” [48,
p. 11] Likewise, Thom, in his articles Les intuitions topologiques primordiales
de l’aristotélisme and Matière, forme et catastrophes, refers to Aristotle as
“the Master” (“le Maı̂tre”). Thompson writes in On growth and form [48,
p. 15]:
[Aristotle] recognized great problems of biology that are still ours
today, problems of heredity, of sex, of nutrition and growth, of
adaptation, of the struggle for existence, of the orderly sequence of
Nature’s plan. Above all he was a student of Life itself. If he was
a learned anatomist, a great student of the dead, still more was
he a lover of the living. Evermore his world is in movement. The
seed is growing, the heart is beating, the frame breathing. The
ways and habits of living things must be known: how they work
and play, love and hate, feed and procreate, rear and tend their
young; whether they dwell solitary, or in more and more organized
companies and societies. All such things appeal to his imagination
and his diligence.
Before Thom, D’Arcy Thompson foresaw the importance of topology in
biology. He writes, in the same treatise [48, p. 609 ff]:
[. . . ] for in this study of a segmenting egg we are on the verge of a
subject adumbrated by Leibniz, studied more deeply by Euler, and
greatly developed of recent years. [. . . ] Topological analysis seems
somewhat superfluous here; but it may come into use some day to
11D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) was a Scottish biologist with a profound
passion for mathematics and for Greek science and philosophy. He was also an accom-
plished writer and his magnum opus, On growth and form, is an authentic literary piece.
He is considered as the first who found a relation between the Fibonacci sequence and
some logarithmic spiral structures in the animal and vegetable life (mollusk shells, rumi-
nant horns, etc.). His works were influential on several 20th century thinkers including C.
H. Waddington, Alan Turing, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Le Corbusier and on artists such as
Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. D’Arcy Thompson translated Aristotle’s History
of animals, a translation which is among the authoritative ones.
12
The quote is from Dante’s Inferno, in which he mentions Aristotle: “I saw the master
of those who know.”
describe and classify such complicated, and diagnostic, patterns as

are seen in the wings of a butterfly or a fly.
A question which is dear to topologists and which we already mentioned
is that of the “local implies global.” Thompson addressed it in his book On
growth and form. He writes (p. 2019):
The biologist, as well as the philosopher, learns to recognize that
the whole is not merely the sum of its parts. It is this, and much
more than this. For it is not a bundle of parts but an organization
of parts, of parts in their mutual arrangement, fitting one with
another, in what Aristotle calls “a single and indivisible principle
of unity”; and this is no merely metaphysical conception, but is in
biology the fundamental truth which lies at the basis of Geoffroy’s
(or Goethe’s) law of “compensation,” or “balancement of growth.”
It is of course not coincidental that Thompson mentions Goethe and
Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and it is well worth to recall here that Goethe was
also a passionate student of biology, in particular, of form and morphol-
ogy. He wrote an essay on the evolution of plants based on their form.
To him is generally attributed the first use of the word “metamorphosis” in
botanics—even though the concept was present in Aristotle, who studied
the metamorphosis of butterflies, gnats and other insects—.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the other naturalist to whom D’Arcy Thomp-
son refers, wrote an important treatise in three volumes titled Histoire na-
turelle générale des règnes organiques (General natural history of organic
worlds) in which he carries out a classification of animals that is still used
today. In commenting on Aristotle, Goeffroy writes in this treatise [19, vol.
I, p. 19 ss.]:
He is, in every branch of human knowledge, like a master who
develops it alone. He reaches, he extends, the limit of all sciences,
and at the same time he penetrates their intimate depths. From
this point of view, Aristotle is an absolutely unique exception in
the history of human thought, and if something here is amazing, it
is not the fact that this exception is unique, but that there exists
one, as such a meeting of faculties and of knowledge is surprising
for anyone who wants to notice it psychologically. [. . . ] Among his
multiple treatises, the History of animals and the Parts are the
main monuments of his genius.13
To close this section, let me mention that the biologist Thomas Lecuit,
newly appointed professor at Collège de France, and gave his first course,
in the year 2017-2018, on the problem of morphogenesis, started his first
lecture by a tribute to D’Arcy Thompson, emphasizing his contribution to
the problem of understanding the diversity of forms and the mathematical
patterns underlying them and their transformations, and highlighting the
13
Il est, dans chaque branche du savoir humain, comme un maı̂tre qui la cultiverait
seule; il atteint, il recule les limites de toutes les sciences, et il en pénètre en même temps les
profondeurs intimes. Aristote est, à ce point de vue, une exception absolument unique dans
l’histoire de l’esprit humain, et si quelque chose doit nous étonner ici, ce n’est pas qu’elle
soit restée unique, c’est qu’il en existe une : tant une semblable réunion de facultés et de
connaissances est surprenante pour qui veut s’en rendre compte psychologiquement. [. . . ]
Entre ses nombreux traités, les deux monuments principaux de son génie sont l’Histoire
des animaux et le Traité des parties.]
continuing importance of his 100 years old book On growth and form. Let
me also mention that in 2017, a workshop dedicated to that book was held
at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
3. Aristotle, mathematician and topologist

Aristotle is very poorly known as a mathematician, a situation which is
unfair. Although he did not write any mathematical treatise (or, rather,
there is no indication that such a treatise existed), Aristotle had an enor-
mous influence on mathematics, by his thorough treatment of first principles,
axioms, postulates and other foundational notions of geometry, by his clas-
sification of the various kinds of logical reasonings, his deep thoughts on
the use of motion (that is, what we call today isometries) in axioms and
in proofs, and on the consequences of that use. There are may ways in
which Aristotle preceded Euclid, not in compiling a list of axioms, but in
his profound vision on the axiomatic approach to geometry. We refer in
particular to his discussions of first principles in his Posterior analytics 14, to
his insistence in the Metaphysics 15 on the fact that a demonstrative science
is based on axioms that are not provable, to his discussion of the reductio ad
absurdum reasoning in the same work,16 and there are many other ideas on
the foundations of mathematics in his work that we could have mentioned.
Besides that, several mathematical propositions are found throughout his
works. We find in particular results related to all the fundamental problems
of mathematics of that epoch: the parallel problem in the Prior analytics,17
the incommesurability of the diagonal of a square18 and the squaring of the
circle (by means of the squaring of lunules) in the same treatise,19 etc. There
is an axiom in the foundations of geometry that was given the name Aris-
totle’s axiom; see Greenberg’s article [20]. In Book III of On the heavens,
talking about form, one of his favorite topics, and commenting on a pas-
sage of Plato’s Timaeus in which regular polyhedra are associated with the
four sublunar elements (earth, water, air, fire), Aristotle states that there
are exactly three regular figures that tile the plane, namely, the equilateral
triangle, the square and the regular hexagon, and that in space, there are
only two: the pyramid and the cube.20 It is possible that this passage is the
oldest surviving written document in which this theorem is stated.21 One
may also consider Aristotle’s Problems,22 a treatise in 38 books, assembled
by themes, one of the longest of the Aristotelian corpus. It consists of a
list of commented (open) problems, of the kind mathematicians are used to
14
Posterior analytics, [4] 74b5 and 76a31-77a4.
15
Metaphysics [8] 997a10.
16
Posterior analytics, [4] 85a16ff.
17
Prior analytics [2] 65a4–9, 66a11-15.
18
Prior analytics [2] 65b16-21.
19
Prior analytics [2] 69a20-5.
20
On the heavens [7] 306b1-5.
21
The reason why Aristotle makes this statement here is not completely clear, but it
is reasonable to assume that it is because Plato, in the Timaeus—a text which is very
mysterious—conjectured that the elementary particles of the four elements have the form
of the regular polyhedra he associated to them; hence the question raised by Aristotle
concerning the tiling of space using regular polyhedra.
22
The translations below are from [5].
edit, with the difference that Aristotle’s problems concern not only mathe-
matics but all subjects of human knowledge: psychology, biology, physics,
acoustics, medicine, ethics, physiology, etc. In total, there are 890 prob-
lems. They generally start with the words “Why is it that...” For instance,
Problem 48 of Book XXVI asks: Why is it that the winds are cold, although
they are due to movement caused by heat? Problem 19 of Book XXXI asks:
Why is it that when we keep our gaze fixed on objects of other colours our
vision deteriorates, whereas it improves if we gaze intently on yellow and
green objects, such as herbs and the like? Problem 20 of the same book
asks: Why is it that we see other things better with both eyes, but we can
judge of the straightness of lines of writing better with one eye? Some of
the problems concern mathematics. For instance, Problem 3 of Book XV
asks: Why do all men, Barbarians and Greek alike, count up to 10 and not
up to any other number, saying for example, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then repeating
then, “one-five”, “two-five”, just as they say eleven, twelve? Problem 5 of the
same book starts with the question: Why is it that, although the sun moves
with uniform motion, yet the increase and decrease of the shadows is not
the same in any equal period of time? Book XVI is dedicated to “inanimate
things.” Problems 1 and 2 in that book concern floating bubbles. Problem
2 asks: Why are bubbles hemispherical? 23 Problem 5 asks: Why is it that
a cylinder, when it is set in motion, travels straight and describes straight
lines with the circles in which it terminates, whereas a cone revolves in a
circle, its apex remaining still, and describes a circle with the circle in which
it terminates? Problem 5 of the same book concerns the traces of oblique
sections of a cylinder rolling on a plane. Problem 6 concerns a property of
straight lines: Why is it that the section of a rolled book, which is flat, if
you cut it parallel to the base becomes straight when unrolled, but if it is cut
obliquely becomes crooked?
Another mathematical topic discussed in detail in Aristotle’s works is
that of infinity, for which the Greeks had a name, apeiron (ἄπειρον), mean-
ing “boundless.” This notion, together with that of limit, is discussed in
the Categories, the Physics, the Metaphysics, On the heavens, and in other
writings. In the Physics,24 Aristotle mentions the two occurrences of the in-
finite in mathematics: the infinitely large, where, he says, “every magnitude
is surpassed” and the infinitely small, where “every assigned magnitude is
surpassed in the direction of smallness.” Aristotle disliked the “unbounded
23
D’Arcy Thompson was also fascinated by the questions of form and transformation
of floating bubbles, in relation with the question of growth of a living cell submitted to a
fluid pressure (cf. On growth and form, Chapters V to VII). On p. 351, he talks about
“the peculiar beauty of a soap-bubble, solitary or in collocation [..] The resulting form is
in such a case so pure and simple that we come to look on it as well-nigh a mathematical
abstraction.” On p. 468, he writes: “Bubbles have many beautiful properties besides
the more obvious ones. For instance, a floating bubble is always part of a sphere, but
never more than a hemisphere; in fact it is always rather less, and a very small bubble is
considerably less than a hemisphere. Again, as we blow up a bubble, its thickness varies
inversely as the square of its diameter; the bubble becomes a hundred and fifty times
thinner as it grows from an inch in a diameter to a foot.” Later in the same chapter,
Thompson talks about clustered bubbles (p. 485). He quotes Plateau on soap-bubble
shapes.
24
Physics, [1] 201a-b.
infinite” and his interest lied in the second kind. He writes in the same
passage:
Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science, by
disproving the actual existence of the infinite in the direction of
increase, in the sense of the untraversable. In point of fact they do
not need the infinite and do not use it. They postulate only that
the finite straight line may be produced as far as they wish.
This is a reference to the occurence of the infinitely large in the axioms of
geometry (predating Euclid). It is interesting to note that Descartes consid-
ered that only the infinitely small appears in mathematics. The infinitely
large, in his conception, belongs to metaphysics only. See the comments by
R. Rashed in his article Descartes et l’infiniment petit [28].
Aristotle, in his discussion of infinity, makes a clear distinction between
the cases where infinity is attained or not. In a passage of the Physics,25 he
provides a list of the various senses in which the word “infinite” is used: (1)
infinity incapable of being gone through; (2) infinity capable of being gone
through having no termination; (3) infinity that “scarcely admits of being
gone through”; (4) infinity that “naturally admits of being gone through,
but is not actually gone through or does not actually reach an end.” He dis-
cusses the possibility for an infinite body to be simple infinite or compound
infinite.26 In the same page, he talks about form, which, he says, “contains
matter and the infinite.” There is also a mention of infinite series in the
Physics.27
One should also talk about the mathematical notion of continuity in the
writings of the Philosopher.
In the Categories, Aristotle starts by classifying quantities into discrete
or continuous.28 He declares that some quantities are such that “each part
of the whole has a relative position to the other parts; others have within
them no such relation of part to part,” a reference to topology. As examples
of discrete quantities, he mentions number (the integers) and speech. As
examples of continuous quantities, he gives lines, surfaces, solids, time and
place (a further reference to topology). He explains at length, using the
mathematical language at his disposal, why the set of integers is discrete.
According to him, two arbitrary integers “have no common boundary, but
are always separate.” He declares that the same holds for speech: “there is
no common boundary at which the syllables join, but each is separate and
distinct from the rest.” This is a way of saying that each integer (respectively
each syllable) is isolated from the others. Aristotle writes that a line is a
continuous quantity “for it is possible to find a common boundary at which
its parts join.” He decalres that space is a continuous quantity “because the
parts of a solid occupy a certain space, and these have a common boundary;
it follows that the parts of space also, which are occupied by the parts
of the solid, have the same common boundary as the parts of the solid.”
Time, he writes, is also a continuous quantity, “for its parts have a common
25
Physics, [1] 204a.
26
Physics, [1] 204b10.
27
Physics [1] 206a25-206b13.
28
Categories [10] 4b20.
boundary.” The notion of boundary is omnipresent in this discussion. Thom

was fascinated by this fact and he emphasized it in writings. We shall discuss
this in more detail later in this paper.
In another passage of the Categories, Aristotle discusses position and rela-
tive position, notions that apply to both discrete and continuous quantities:
“Quantities consist either of parts which bear a relative position each to
each, or of parts which do not.”29 Among the quantities of the former kind,
he mentions the line, the plane, the solid space, for which one may state
“what is the position of each part and what sort of parts are contiguous.”
On the contrary, he says, the parts of the integers do not have any relative
position each to each, or a particular position, and it is impossible to state
what parts of them are contiguous. The parts of time, even though the
latter is a continuous quantity, do not have position, because he says, “none
of them has an abiding existence, and that which does not abide can hardly
have position.” Rather, he says, such parts have a relative order, like for
number, and the same holds for speech: “None of its parts has an abiding
existence: when once a syllable is pronounced, it is not possible to retain
it, so that, naturally, as the parts do not abide, they cannot have position.”
In this and in other passages of Aristotle’s work, motion and the passage of
time are intermingled with spatiality. It is interesting to see that Hermann
Weyl, in his book Space, time and matter, also insisted on the importance
of the relation between, on the one hand, motion, and, on the other hand,
space, time and matter [51, p. 1]: “It is the composite idea of motion that
these three fundamental conceptions enter into intimate relationship.”
Talking about position, we come to the important notion of place.
Several Greek mathematicians insisted on the difference between space
and place, and Aristotle was their main representative. They used the word
khôra (χώρα) for the former and topos (τόπος) for the latter. Again, Thom
regards Aristotle’s discussion from a mathematician point of view, and he
considers it as readily leading to a topological mathematization, although it
does not use the notational apparatus (which, at that time, was nonexistent)
or the technical language of topology to which we are used today. In the
Physics, Aristotle gives the following characteristics of place30: (1) Place
is what contains that of which it is the place. (2) Place is no part of the
thing. (3) The immediate place of a thing is neither less nor greater than
the thing. (4) Place can be left behind by the thing and is separable. (5)
All place admits of the distinction of up and down, and each of the bodies
is naturally carried to its appropriate place and rests there, and this makes
the place either up or down.
This makes Aristotle’s concept of place close to our mathematical notion
of boundary. Furthermore, it confers to the notion of place the status of a
“relative” notion: a place is defined in terms of boundary, and the boundary
is also the boundary of something else. At the same time, this is not too
far from the notion of “relative position” that was formalized later on in
Galilean mechanics. Aristotle writes in the same passage:
29
Categories [10] 5a10.
30
Physics, [1] 211a ff.
We ought to try to make our investigations such as will render an

account of place, and will not only solve the difficulties connected
with it, but will also show that the attributes supposed to belong
to it do really belong to it, and further will make clear the cause
of the trouble and of the difficulties about it.
Aristotle then introduces a dynamical aspect in his analysis of place. He
discusses motion and states that locomotion and the phenomena of increase
and diminution involve a variation of place. In the same passage of the
Physics, he writes:
When what surrounds, then, is not separate from the thing, but is
in continuity with it, the thing is said to be in what surrounds it,
not in the sense of in place, but as a part in a whole. But when
the thing is separate or in contact, it is immediately ‘in’ the inner
surface of the surrounding body, and this surface is neither a part
of what is in it nor yet greater than its extension, but equal to it;
for the extremities of things which touch are coincident.
Regarding place and its relation to boundary, we mention another passage
from the Physics:31 “Place is [. . . ] the boundary of the containing body at
which it is in contact with the contained body. (By the contained body is
meant what can be moved by way of locomotion).” Thom commented on
this passage at several occasions. In his paper Aristote topologue [47], he
discusses the relation, in Aristotle’s writings, between topos and eschata
(ἔσχατα), that is, the limits, or extreme boundaries. We shall elaborate on
this below.
The overall discussion of place in Aristotle’s work, and its relation with
shape and boundary is involved, and the various translations of the relevant
passages in his writings often differ substantially from each and depend on
the understanding of their author. This not a surprise, and the reader may
imagine the difficulties in formulating a precise definition of boundary which
does not use the language of modern topology. As a matter of fact, Aristotle
emphasized the difficulty of defining place. In the Physics, he writes:
Place is thought to be something important and hard to grasp,
both because the matter and the shape present themselves along
with it, and because the displacement of the body that is moved
takes place in a stationary container, for it seems possible that
there should be an interval which is other than the bodies which
are moved. [. . . ] Hence we conclude that the innermost motionless
boundary of what contains is place. [. . . ] Place is thought to be
a kind of surface, and as it were a vessel, i.e. a container of the
thing. Further; place is coincident with the thing, for boundaries
are coincident with the bounded.32
Place is also strongly related to form. Aristotle states that form is the
boundary of the thing whereas place is the boundary of the body that con-
tains the thing. Thom interpreted the texts where Aristotle makes a dis-
tinction between “the boundary of a thing” and “the boundary of the body
that contains it”—a structure of “double ring” of the eschata, as he describes
31
Physics, [1] 211b5-9.
32
Physics [1] 212a20.
it—using homological considerations. More precisely, he saw there a version

of the Stokes formula. We shall review this in §4 below.
Let us quote a well-known text which belongs to the Pythagorean litera-
ture, written by Eudemus of Rhodes (4th c. BCE), in which the latter quotes
Archytas of Tarentum. This text shows the kind of questions on space and
place that the Greek philolophers before Aristotle addressed, e.g., whether
space is bounded or not, whether “outer space” exists, and the paradoxes to
which this existence leads (see [22, p. 541]):
“But Archytas,” as Eudemus says, “used to propound the argument
in this way: ‘If I arrived at the outermost edge of the heaven [that
is to say at the fixed heaven], could I extend my hand or staff into
what is outside or not?’ It would be paradoxical not to be able to
extend it. But if I extend it, what is outside will be either body or
place. It doesn’t matter which, as we will learn. So then he will
always go forward in the same fashion to the limit that is supposed
in each case and will ask the same question, and if there will always
be something else to which his staff [extends], it is clear that it is
also unlimited. And if it is a body, what was proposed has been
demonstrated. If it is place, place is that in which body is or could
be, but what is potential must be regarded as really existing in
the case of eternal things, and thus there would be unlimited body
and space.” (Eudemus, Fr. 65 Wehrli, Simplicius, In Ar. Phys. iii
4; 541)
Let us now pass to other aspects of mathematics in Aristotle. We men-
tioned in the introduction his notion of homeomerous. This is used at several
occasions in his works, and especially in his zoological treatises. He intro-
duces it at the beginning of the History of animals [12], where he talks about
simple and complex parts. A part is simple, he says, if, when divided, one
recovers parts that have the same form as the original part, otherwise, it
is complex. For instance, a face is subdivided into eyes, a nose, a mouth,
cheeks, etc., but not into faces. Thus, a face is a complex part of the body.
On the other hand, blood, bone, nerves, flesh, etc. are simple parts because
subdividing them gives blood, bone, nerves, flesh, etc. Anhomeomorous
parts in turn are composed of homeomerous parts: for instance, a hand is
constituted of flesh, nerves and bones. The classification goes on. Among
the parts, some are called “members.” These are the parts which form a
complete whole but which also contain distinct parts: for example, a head,
a leg, a hand, a chest, etc. Aristotle also makes a distinction between parts
responsible of “act”, which in general are inhomogeneous (like the hand) and
the others, which are homogeneous (like blood) and which he considers as
“potential parts.” In D’Arcy Thompson’s translation, the word “homeomer-
ous” is translated by “uniform with itself,” and sometimes by “homogeneous.”
We mention that the term homeomoerous was also used in geometry, to de-
note lines that are self-similar in the sense that any part of them can be
moved to coincide with any other part. Proclus, the 5th century mathemati-
cian, philosopher and historian of mathematics, discusses this notion in his
Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. He gives as an exam-
ple of a homeomerous curve the cylindical helix, attributing the definition
to Apollonius in his book titled On the screw and which does not survive.
Among the curves of similar shape that are not homeomerous, he gives the
example of Archimedes’ (planar) spiral, the conical helix, and the spherical
helix (see p. 95 of ver Eecke’s edition of his Commentary on the First Book
of Euclid’s Elements [27]). In the same work, Proclus attributes to Geminus
a result stating that there are only three homeomerous curves: the straight
line, the circle and the cylindrical helix [27, p. 102].
Aristotle was a mathematician in his unrelenting desire for making ex-
haustive classifications and of finding structure in phenomena: after all, he
introduced his Categories for that purpose. In the History of animals, like
in several other treatises by Aristotle, the sense of detail is dizzying. He
writes (D’Arcy Thompson’s translation)33:
Of the substances that are composed of parts uniform (or homo-
geneous) with themselves, some are soft and moist, others are dry
and solid. The soft and moist are such either absolutely or so long
as they are in their natural conditions, as, for instance, blood,
serum, lard, suet, marrow, sperm, gall, milk in such as have it
flesh and the like; and also, in a different way, the superfluities,
as phlegm and the excretions of the belly and the bladder. The
dry and solid are such as sinew, skin, vein, hair, bone, gristle, nail,
horn (a term which as applied to the part involves an ambiguity,
since the whole also by virtue of its form is designated horn), and
such parts as present an analogy to these.
Thom, in Chapter 7 of his Esquisse, comments on Aristotle’s methods of
classification developed in the Parts of animals, relating it to his own work
as a topologist. He recalls that Aristotle
attacks therein the Platonic method of dichotomy, suggesting in its
place an interrogative method for taking the substrate into consid-
eration. Thus, if we propose to attain a definition characterizing
the “essence” of an animal, we should not, says Aristotle, pose
series of questions bearing on “functionally independent” charac-
teristics. For example, “Is is a winged or a terrestrial animal?” or
“Is it a wild animal or a tame one?” Such a battery of questions
bearing on semantic fields —genera— unrelated one to the other,
can be used in an arbitrary order. The questionnaire may indeed
lead to a definition of sorts, but it will be a purely artificial one. It
would be more rational to have a questionnaire with a tree struc-
ture, its ramification corresponding to the substrate. For instance,
after the question: “Is the animal terrestrial?”, if the answer is yes,
we will ask, “Does the animal have legs?” If the answer is again
yes, we then ask, “Is the foot all in one (solid), or cloven, or does it
bear digits?” Thus we will reach a definition which is at the same
time a description of the organism in question. Whence a better
grasp of its essence in its phenomenal aspect. Aristotle observes,
for instance, that if one poses a dilemma bearing on a private op-
position, presence of A, absence of A, the natural posterity of the
absence of A in the question-tree is empty. In a way the tree of this
questionnaire is the reflection of a dynamic inside the substrate.
It is the dynamic of the blowing-up of the centre of the body (the
33History of animals [12] 487a.

soul), unique in potentiality, into a multitude of part souls in ac-

tuality. In a model of the catastrophe type, it is the “unfolding”
dynamics.
It may be fitting to cite also the following passage from the History of
animals, on the mysteries of embryology, and more precisely on the relation
between the local and the global that plays a central role in this domain:34
The fact is that animals, if they be subjected to a modification in
minute organs, are liable to immense modifications in their general
configuration. This phenomenon may be observed in the case of
gelded animals: only a minute organ of the animal is mutilated,
and the creature passes from the male to the female form. We
may infer, then, that if in the primary conformation of the embryo
an infinitesimally minute but absolutely essential organ sustain a
change of magnitude one way or the other, the animal will in one
case turn to male and in the other to female; and also that, if the
said organ be obliterated altogether, the animal will be of neither
one sex nor the other. And so by the occurrence of modification in
minute organs it comes to pass that one animal is terrestrial and
another aquatic, in both senses of these terms. And, again, some
animals are amphibious whilst other animals are not amphibious,
owing to the circumstance that in their conformation while in the
embryonic condition there got intermixed into them some portion
of the matter of which their subsequent food is constituted; for,
as was said above, what is in conformity with nature is to every
single animal pleasant and agreeable.
To close this section, I would like to say a few more words on Aristotle
as a scientist, from Thom’s point of view, and in particular, regarding the
(naive) opposition that is usually made between Aristotelian and Galilean
science, claiming that the mathematization of nature, as well as the so-
called “experimental method” started with Galileo and other moderns, and
not before, and in any case, not with Aristotle.
The lack of “mathematization” in Aristotle’s physics, together with the
absence of an “experimental method” are due in great part due to the lack of
measurements, and this was intentional. In fact, Aristotle (like Thom after
him) was interested in the qualitative aspects, and not the quantitative.
Furthermore, he was reluctant to think in terms of a “useful science”: he was
the kind of scholar who was satisfied with doing science for the pleasure of
the intellect. Thom’s vision of Aristotelian science was completely different
of the commonly accepted one, and the fact that Aristotle was a proponent
of the qualitative vs. the quantitative was in line with his own conception
of science. In his article Aristote et l’avènement de la science moderne : la
rupture galiléenne (Aristotle and the advent of modern science: the Galilean
break), published in 1991, he writes [44, p. 489]:
I would be tempted to say that one can see frequently enough a
somewhat paternalistic attitude of condescension regarding Aris-
totle in the mouth of contemporary scholars. I think that this
attitude is not justified. It is usually claimed that the Galilean
34History of animals [12] 589b30 ff.

epistemological break brought to science a radical progress, anni-

hilating the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian physics. But here
too, one must rather see the effect of this brutal transformation
as a scientific revolution in the sense of Kuhn, that is, a change
in paradigms, where the problems solved by the ancient theory
stop being objects of interest and disappear from the speculative
landscape. The new theory produces new problem, which it can
solve more or less happily, but above all, it leads to an occultation
of all the ancient problematic which nevertheless continues its un-
derground journey under the clothing of new techniques and new
formalisms.
I think that very precisely, maybe since ten years, one can see in
modern science the reappearance of a certain number of themes
and methods that are close to the Aristotelian doctrine, and I per-
sonally welcome this kind of resurgence that I will try to describe
for you. What I will talk to you about may not belong as much to
Aristotle, of whom, by the way, I have a poor knowledge, than to
certain recent evolutions of science that recall, I hope without ex-
cessive optimism, certain fundamental ideas of Aristotelian physics
and metaphysics.35
In his development, Thom talks about Aristotelian logic, closely linked to
his ontology, and makes science appear as a “logical language”, forming an
“isomorphic image of natural behavior.” He also talks about the “mathema-
tization of nature” that the so-called Galilean break brought as a hiatus
between the mathematical and the common languages, and about the disin-
terest in the Aristotelian notion of formal causality that characterizes mod-
ern science and which would have been so useful in embryology. He gives
examples from Aristotelean mechanics, in particular his concept of time,
which he links to ideas on thermodynamics, entropy and Boltzmann’s which
describes the tendency of an isolated ideal gaz system towards a thermody-
namical equilibrium state.
Even if Thom’s point of view is debatable, it has the advantage of making
history richer and gives it a due complexity.
35Je serais tenté de dire qu’une attitude de condescendance un peu paternaliste se re-
marque assez fréquemment dans la bouche des savants contemporains à l’égard d’Aristote.
Et je pense que cette attitude n’est pas justifiée. Il est courant de dire que la rupture épisté-
mologique galiléenne a amené en science un progrès radical, réduisant à néant les concepts
fondamentaux de la physique aristotélicienne. Mais là aussi, il faut voir l’effet de cette
transformation brutale plutôt à la manière d’une révolution scientifique au sens de Kuhn,
c’est-à-dire comme un changement de paradigmes : les problèmes résolus par l’ancienne
théorie cessant d’être objet d’intérêt et disparaissant du champ spéculatif. La nouvelle
théorie dégage des problèmes neufs, qu’elle peut résoudre avec plus ou moins de bonheur,
mais surtout elle conduit à occulter toute la problématique ancienne qui n’en poursuit
pas moins son cheminement souterrain sous l’habillement des nouvelles techniques et des
nouveaux formalismes.
Je pense que très précisément, depuis peut-être une dizaine d’années, on voit réapparaı̂tre
dans la science moderne un certain nombre de thèmes et de méthodes proches de la doc-
trine aristotélicien, et je salue quant à moi cette espèce de résurgence que je vais essayer de
vous décrire. Ce dont je vous parlerai ce n’est donc peut-être pas tant d’Aristote, que je
connais mal d’ailleurs, que de certaines évolutions récentes de la science qui me semblent
évoquer, sans optimisme excessif, j’espère, certaines idées fondamentales de la physique et
de la métaphysique aristotélicienne.
As a final remark on mathematics in Aristotle, I would like to recall his

reluctance to accept the Pythagorean theories of symbolism in numbers,
which he expressed at several places in his work.36 Incidentally, mathemati-
cians tend to refer to Plato rather than to Aristotle, because the former’s
conception of the world gives a more prominent place to mathematics. But
whereas Plato’s mathematics is an abstract mathematics, dissociated from
the world, the one of Aristotle, is connected with nature. This is consistent
with Thom’s view. In his paper Logos phenix published in the book Mod-
èles mathématiques de la morphogenèse [36] which we already mentioned,
he writes: “What remains in me of a professional mathematician can hardly
accept that mathematics is only a pointless construction without any attach
to reality.”37
We shall talk more about Thom’s view on Aristotle in the next sections.
4. Thom on Aristotle
Chapter 5 of Thom’s Esquisse is titled The general plan of animal organi-
zation and is in the lineage of the zoological treatises of Aristotle, expressed
in the language of modern topology. Thom writes in the introduction: “This
presentation might be called an essay in transcendental anatomy, by which I
mean that animal organization will be considered here only from the topol-
ogists’ abstract point of view.” He then writes: “We shall be concerned with
ideal animals, stylized images of existing animals, leaving aside all consider-
ations of quantitative size and biochemical composition, to retain only those
inter-organic relations that have a topological and functional character.” In
§B of the same chapter, Thom returns to Aristotle’s notion of homeomer-
ous and anhomeomerous, in relation with the stratification of an animal’s
organism, formulating in a modern topological language the condition for
two organism to “have the same organisation.”
An organism, in Thom’s words, is a three-dimensional ball O equipped
with a stratification, which is finite if we decide to neglect too fine details.
For example, when considering the vascular system, Thom stops at the de-
tails which may be seen with the naked eye: arterioles and veinlets. He
writes: “We will thus avoid introducing fractal morphologies which would
take us outside the mathematical schema of stratification.” Seen from this
point of view, the homeomerous parts are the strata of dimension three
(blood, flesh, the inside of bones...), the two-dimensional strata are the
membranes: skin, mucous membrane, periosteum, intestinal wall, walls of
the blood vessels, articulation surfaces, etc., the one-dimensional strata are
the nerves: vessel axes, hairs, etc., and the zero-dimensional strata are the
points of junction between the one-dimensional strata or the punctual sin-
gularities: corners of the lips, ends of hairs, etc.
Thom says that two organisms O and O0 “have the same organisation”
if there exists a homeomorphism h : O → O0 preserving this stratification.
He claims that such a formalism generalizes D’Arcy Thompson’s famous
diagrams and makes them more precise. The reference here is to Thompson’s
36Cf. for instance Metaphysics [8] 1080b16-22.
37Ce qui reste en moi du mathématicien professionnel admet difficilement que la math-
ématique ne soit qu’une construction gratuite dépourvue de toute attache au réel.
sketches from On growth and Form which describe passages between various
species of fishes using homeomorphisms that preserve zero-dimensional, one-
dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional strata.
Homeomorphisms preserving stratifications, from D’Arcy Thompson’s On growth

and form
Thom developed his ideas on the stratification of the animal body in the
series of lectures given in 1988 at the Solignac Abbey, a medieval monastery
in the Limousin (South of France). The lectures are titled Structure et
fonction en biologie aristotélicienne (Structure and function is Aristotelian
biology) and the lecture notes ara available [41]. On p. 7 of these notes, he
addresses the question of when two animals have isomorphic stratifications,
and he uses for this the notion of isotopy between stratified spaces: two
sets E1 , E2 have isotopic stratifications if there exists a stratification of the
product E × [0, 1] such that the canonical projection p : E × [0, 1] → [0, 1]
is of rank one on every stratum of E, with E1 = p−1 (1) and E2 = p−1 (2).
He considers that this notion is implicitly used by Aristotle in his classifi-
cation of the animals, insisting on the fact that the latter neglected all the
quantitative differences and was only interested in the qualitative ones. In
the same passage, he recalls that D’Arcy Thompson, who translated Aristo-
tle’s History of Animals, acknowledged that he found there the idea of his
diagrams.
Chapter 7 of Thom’s Esquisse is called Perspectives in Aristotelian bi-

ology. The first part concerns topology and bears the title The primordial
topological intuitions of Aristotelianism: Aristotle and the continuum. It
starts as follows [42, p. 165]:
We shall present here those intuitions which we believe sub-tend
all Aristotelianism. They are ideas that are never explicitly devel-
oped by the author, but which—to my mind—are the framework
of the whole architecture of his system. We come across these
ideas formulated “by the way” as it were, condensed into a few
small sentences that light up the whole corpus with their bright
concision.
Thom highlights and comments on several citations from Aristotle which
show, according to him, that Aristotle was aware of the basic notions of
topology. He declares in particular that a careful reading of Aristotle’s
Physics shows that the Philosopher understood the topological distinction
between a closed and an open set. He writes, [42, p. 167-168]:
Careful reading of the Physica leaves little doubt but that [Aristo-
tle] had indeed perceived this difference. “It is a whole and limited;
not, however, by itself, but by something other than itself”38 could
hardly be interpreted except in terms of a bounded open set. In
the same vein, the affirmation: “The extremities of a body and of
its envelope are the same”39 can be identified, if the envelope is of
a negligible thickness, with the well-known axiom of general topol-
ogy: “Closure of closure is closure itself” expressed by Kuratowski
at the beginning of this century. This allows the Stagirite to dis-
tinguish two infinites: the great infinite that envelops everything
and the small infinite that is bounded. This latter is the infinite of
the continuum, able to take an infinity of divisions (into parts that
are themselves continuous). Whence the definition he proposes:
“The infinite has an intrinsic substrate, the sensible continuum.”40
In his 1988 article Les intuitions topologiques primordiales de l’aristotélisme
[40] and in his 1991 article Matière, forme et catastrophes [43], Thom re-
turns to these matters, explaining that the modern topological distinction
between an open and a closed set is related to Aristotle’s philosophical dis-
tinctions between form and matter and between actuality and potentiality.
He gives an explanation for the difference between the notion of bounded
and unbounded open set in Aristotle’s philosophical system: the former may
exist as a substrate of being whereas the latter cannot [40, p. 396]. Concern-
ing the notion of boundary, he comments on formulae such as: “Form is
the boundary of matter,” [40, p. 398] and “Actuality is the boundary of po-
tentiality” ([40, p. 399] and [43, p. 380]). He recalls that the paradigmatic
substance for Aristotle is the living being, which is nothing else than a ball
in Euclidean space, whose boundary is a sphere (provided, Thom says, one
neglects the necessary physiological orifices), that is, a closed surface without
boundary. Shapeless matter is enveloped by form—eidos—in the same way
as the boundary of a bronze statue defines its shape. The boundary of a
38Physics [1] 207a24-35.
39Physics [1] 211b12.
40Physics [1] 208a.
living organism is its skin, and its “interior” exists only as a potentiality. A
homeomerous part of an animal has generally a boundary structure consti-
tuted by anhomeomerous parts. Thus, the substrate of a homeomerous part
is not closed.41 Mathematics, philosophy and biology are intermingled in
this interpretation of a living organism, following Aristotle, with formulae
like: “The opposition homeomerous-anhomeomerous is a “representation” (a
homomorphic image) of the metaphysical opposition: potentiality-act. As
the anhomeomerous is part of the boundary of a homeomerous of one di-
mension higher, we recover a case of the application of act as boundary of
the potentiality.”42
Thom refers to Chapter 16 of Book Z of the Metaphysics, interpreting a
sentence of the Metaphysics on entelechy (ἐντελέχεια) (the “creative princi-
ple”, by which being passes from potentiality to action): “Entelechy sepa-
rates”, as the opposition between an open and a closed set, more precisely,
by the fact that “a closed segment is ‘actual’ as opposed to the semi-open
interval which exists only as a potentiality.”43 He writes again, in the same
passage [43, p. 381]: “An open substrate characterizes potential entity. A
closed substrate is required for the acting being.”44
In a passage of the Esquisse, Thom talks about Aristotle as “the philoso-
pher of the continuous” [42, p. viii], and he considers that his chief merit
was that he was “the only one who thought in terms of the continuous” for
hundreds, may be thousands of years. In his article Logos phenix, Thom
writes: “How can we explain that mathematics represents the real? The re-
sponse, I thinks, is offered to us by the intuition of the continuous. [. . . ] The
introduction of an underlying continuous substrate allows us henceforth to
explain the significant—non-trivial—character of several mathematical the-
orems.”45 [36, p. 292ff]. Thom expands then this idea, giving as examples
the implicit function theorem and Taylor’s formula, each of them allowing
a global knowledge from a local one, all this based on the existence of a
continuous substrate. In the book Prédire n’est pas expliquer [45, p. 81-82],
turning to the distinction that the Greek philosophers made between the
discrete and the continuous, he declares: “For me, the fundamental aporia
of mathematics is certainly the opposition between the discrete and the con-
tinuous. And this aporia at the same time dominates all thought. [. . . ] The
origin of scientific thinking, we find it in the apories of Zeno of Elea: the
41Une partie homéomère a en général un bord constitué d’anhoméomères ; ainsi le
substrat d’un homéomère n’est pas – en général – un ensemble fermé au sens de la topologie
moderne. ([40, p. 398]).
42L’opposition homéomère-anhoméomère est une “représentation” (une image homo-
morphe) de l’opposition métaphysique : puissance-acte. Comme l’anhoméomère est partie
du bord d’un homéomère de dimension plus grande, on retrouve ainsi un cas d’application
de l’acte bord de la puissance [40, p. 400].
43Le segment fermé est “actuel” par opposition à l’intervalle semi-ouvert qui n’est qu’en
puissance.
44Un substrat ouvert caractérise l’entité en puissance. Un substrat fermé est requis
pour l’être en acte.
45Comment expliquer que les mathématiques représentent le réel ? La réponse, je crois,
nous est offerte par l’intuition du continu. [. . . ] L’introduction d’un substrat continu
sous-jacent permet dès lors de s’expliquer le caractère signifiant – non trivial – de bien des
théorèmes de la mathématiques.
story of Achilles and the tortoise. Here, we find the crucial opposition be-
tween the discontinuous and the continuous.”46 Thom declares in the same
work, concerning this distinction between the continuous and the discrete:
The continuous is in some way the universal substrate of thought,
and in particular of mathematical thought. But we cannot think of
anything in an effective way without having something like the dis-
crete in the continuous flow of mental processes: there are words,
sentences, etc. The logos, discourse, is always discrete; these are
words, coming in with a certain order, but they are discrete words.
And the discrete immediately calls down the quantitative. There
are points: we can count them; there are words in a sentence: we
can classify them quantitatively by the grammatical function they
occupy in a sentence. However there is an undeniable multiplic-
ity.”47
On the same subject, in his article Logos phenix, Thom writes [36, p. 294]:
Meaning is always tied to the attribution of a place of spatial na-
ture to an expression formally encoded. There should always be,
in any meaningful message, a discontinuous component tied to the
generative mechanisms of language—to symbols—, and a contin-
uous component, a substrate, in which the continuous component
cuts out a place.48
In the foreword to the Esquisse, Thom writes that Aristotle’s geometrical
insight was founded uniquely on an intuition of the continuous, where a
segment of a straight line is not made out of points but of sub-segments.
Neither Dedekind nor Cantor, he says, have taken that road. He writes that
the single isolated point (the one we consider when we take a point O on the
x0 x-axis), exists only “potentially.” Such a point, according to him, aspires to
actuality by duplicating itself into two points O1 , O2 , O1 adhering to the left,
O2 to the right. “These two points then being distinct even though they are
together (ἅμα), the two half-segments so limited attain full existence, being
in actuality.” [42, p. viii] Thom refers for that to the Metaphysics 139a3-
7.49 The question is also that of knowing what expressions like “is made
46Pour moi, l’aporie fondamentale de la mathématique est bien dans l’opposition
discret-continu. Et cette aporie domine en même temps toute la pensée. [. . . ] L’origine
de la pensée scientifique, on la trouve dans les apories de Zénon l’Élée : l’histoire d’Achille
et de la tortue. Il y a là l’opposition cruciale entre discontinu et continu.
47Le continu est en quelque sorte le substrat universel de la pensée, et de la pensée
mathématique en particulier. Mais on en peut rien penser de manière effective sans avoir
quelque chose comme le discret dans ce déroulement continu de processus mentaux : il
y a des mots, il y a des phrases, etc. Le logos, le discours, c’est toujours du discret ; ce
sont des mots entrant dans une certaine succession, mais des mots discrets. Et le discret
appelle immédiatement le quantitatif. Il y a des points : on les compte ; il a des mots
dans une phrase : on peut les classer quantitativement par la fonction grammaticale qu’ils
occupent dans la phrase, mais il n’empêche qu’il y a une incontestable multiplicité.
48Le sens est toujours lié à l’attribution d’une place de nature spatiale à une expression
formellement codée. Il y aurait toujours, dans tout message signifiant, une composante dis-
continue liée aux mécanismes génératifs de la langue – aux symboles –, et une composante
continue, un substrat, dans lequel la composante continue découpe une place.
49In a footnote, Thom refers to a passage in Dieudonné’s Pour l’Honneur de l’esprit
humain [18] as a “fine example of modern incomprehension of the Aristotelian point of
view.” In p. 229 of this book, Dieudonné criticizes Aristotle for his view of infinity, on the
of” or “are part of”, applied to points and lines, mean. In his Solignac 1988
notes, quoting a passage from Aristotle’s Parts of animals in which the latter
compares an animal vascular system to a garden irrigation ditch,50 Thom
notes that the Philosopher goes as far as to say that blood is not part of the
organism,51 because it is dense there, and that this does not belong to the
definition of “being part of” [41, p. 7].
In the same foreword to his Esquisse, Thom recalls that Aristotle consid-
ered that the underlying substrate of both matter and form is continuous
[42, p. viii]:
I knew of course that the hylomorphic schema—of which I make use
in the catastrophe formalism—originated in the Stagirite’s work.
But I was unaware of the essential fact that Aristotle had at-
tempted in his Physics to construct a world theory based not on
numbers but on continuity. He had thus (at least partly) realized
something I have always dreamed of doing—the development of
mathematics of the continuous, which would take the notion of
continuum as point of departure, without (if possible) any evoca-
tion of the intrinsic generativity of numbers.
On the same subject, Thom recalls in the Esquisse that Aristotle’s de-
cision to quit Plato’s Academy is due to a disagreement with his master
concerning the notion of continuity. He explains this in a long passage [42,
p. 166]:
The Ancients knew that the moving point generates a curve, that
a moving curve generates a surfaces, and that the movement of
a surface generates a volume. It seems that the aging Plato—
or his epigones—considered this generation to be of the type of
discrete generativity, that of the sequence of natural integers. So
the point, which is a pure “zero”, could not serve as a base of
this construction—whence the necessity of “thickening” the point
into a “unsecable length” (ἄτομος γραμμή), which was the gener-
ating principle of the straight line (ἀρχὴ γραμμῆς). The Timaeus’
demiurge could then use this unsecable length to construct the
polygons and polyhedrons which constitute the elements. It is odd
to note that this kind of hypothesis still haunts our contemporary
physicists; the elementary length (10−33 cm) below which space
no longer has a physical meaning, or that absolute spacial dimen-
sion given by the confinement of quarks in nuclear physics, are
so many absolute “lengths” associated with physical agents. Why
did Aristotle reject this sort of hypothesis? No doubt because he
held number generativity in disregard. His revolt against Plato is
that of the topologist against the arithmetic imperialism, that of
the apostle of the qualitative against the quantitative. Aristotle
basically postulates the notion of continuity (συνεχές), and it is
in the name of the divisibility of the continuum that he refuses
the “indivisible lines.” A priori this is a paradoxical position. In-
deed, Aristotle never admitted the existence of space in the sense
basis of the passage 231a21-232a22 of the Physics where he discusses points on a straight
line, describing his reasoning as an example of “mental coonfusion.”
50Parts of animals [13] 668a10-13.
51Parts of animals [13] 636b21.
in which we have considered it since Descartes. We know why: his

substantialist metaphysics required that extent is made a predicate
of the substance (the topos); in no way could substance, matter,
be a predicate of space. For Aristotle space is never generated
by some intrinsic generative mechanism as our Cartesian space is
generated by the R3 additive group if translations; at the most
it is the place of some entity (ousia), for it is never empty. This
decision to relegate space to a kind of total ostracism led him, by
a singular rebound, to multiply the kinds of matter. Each time of
change (μεταβολή), each genus (γένος), requires a specific matter.
But all these matters have one thing in common: they are con-
tinua (συνεχές); in this sense they all have the character of spatial
extension.
Needless to say, the question of the discreteness or continuity of the ulti-
mate constitution of nature has been at the edge of philosophical thought,
at least since the 5th century BC; one thinks of Leucippus, Democritus,
Empedocles and their followers. In the modern period, as mathematicians,
we think of Riemann who addressed the question in his Habilitation lecture
Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (On the hy-
potheses that lie at the bases of geometry) [29] (1854) (see also the discussion
in Riemann1 ), and Hermann Weyl, who continued Riemann’s tradition.
Plato disliked the notion of point, considering that it has no geometric
meaning. To compensate for this, he used the notion of “unsecable”, that is,
“indivisible” length. Aristotle, in a passage of the Topics,52 quotes Plato’s
definition of straight lines. At several places in his writings, he discussed the
relation between a point and a line. For him, a line is a continuous object
and as such it cannot be neither a collection of points nor a collection of
indivisible objects of any kind. A point may only be the start, or the end,
or a division point of a line, but it is not a magnitude. The question of
the nonexistence of indivisibles is so important for him that it is treated in
several of his writings.53 In his treatise On the heavens, Book III, Chapter
1, he discusses the analogous question in higher dimensions, that is, the
impossibility of a surface to be a collection of lines, and of a solid to be a
collection of surfaces, unless, he says, we change the axioms of mathematics,
and he adds that this is not advisable. Talking of a change in the axioms
in order to obtain a result is a typical attitude of Aristotle acting as a
mathematician. Entering into the question of whether a geometric line, or,
more generally, a geometric body, is constituted of its points, and if yes, in
what sense this is so, leads us deep into considerations which several Greek
philosophers have thoroughly considered (we mentioned Plato and Aristotle,
but these questions were extensively studied before them, especially by Zeno
of Elea). One may think of the axiomatization of the real line realized in
the 19th century, by Cantor, Dedekind and others. Let me quote here a
sentence by Plotnitsky in the present volume [26] which expresses the current
veiwpoint: “In sum, we do not, and even cannot, know how a continuous
line, straight or curved (which does not matter topologically), is spatially
52Topics, [3] 148b27.
53Physics [1] 215b12-22, 220a1-21 et 231b6, On generation and corruption [11] 317a11,
On the heavens [7] III. 1, 299a10 ff.; there are other passages.
constituted by its points, but we have algebra to address this question, and
have a proof that the answer is rigorously undecidable.”
It might be recalled here that there exists a treatise called On indivisible
lines and belonging to the Peripatetic school (may be to Aristotle), in which
the author criticizes item by item the arguments of the disciples of indivisible
lines [9].
On the relation between Plato and Aristotle, Thom writes the following, in
a note on p. 186 of his Esquisse: “The relations between Plato and Aristotle
constitute one of the topoi of philosophical erudites. [. . . ] My own position
on the question is that of an autodidact.”54 For more on this subject, the
reader is referred to the appendix to the present article.
Let us return to the notion of boundary.
It is interesting to see that this notion is included in Euclid’s Elements
among the elementary notions, at the same level as “point”, “line”, “angle,”
etc. The boundary, there, is what defines a figure. Definition 14 of Book I
says: “A figure is that which is contained by any boundary or boundaries.”
This is clearly related to Thom’s idea, following Aristotle, that a form is
defined by its boundary. Euclid also uses the notion of boundary when he
talks about the measure of angles (not only rectilinear angles). Proclus,
in his Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, writes that
the notion of boundary belongs to the origin of geometry since this science
originated in the need to measure areas of pieces of land. Aristotle, in the
Physics, says that a body may be defined as being “bounded by a surface.”55
The notion of form, since the origin of geometry, is closely related to the
notion of boundary, and it is not surprising to see that the mathematical
notion of boundary which, needless to say, was essential in Thom’s mathe-
matical work, is also central in his philosophical thought. He declares in the
interview La théorie des catastrophes conducted in 1992 [46]:
All the unity of my work is centered at the notion of boundary,
since the notion of cobordism is only one of its generalizations.
The notion of boundary seems to me the more important today
since I am interested in Aristotelian metaphysics. For Aristotle,
the boundary is an individualisation principle. The marble statue
is matter, in the block from where the sculptor extracted it, but
its is its boundary which defines its form.56
Thom also talks about the unity of his work in the series of interviews
Prédire n’est pas expliquer. He declares (1991, [45], p. 20–21):
Truly, there exists a real unity in my reflections. I can see it
only today, after I pondered a lot about it, at the philosophical
level. And this unity, I find it in the notion of boundary. That of
cobordism is related to it. The notion of boundary is all the more
54Thom refers to the books [30] by Robin and [17] by Cherniss. Concerning this subject,
I would like to refer the reader to the appendix to my article, written by S. Negrepontis.
55Physics [1] 204b.
56Toute l’unité de mon travail tourne autour de la notion de bord, car la notion de
cobordisme n’en est qu’une généralisation. La notion de bord me paraı̂t d’autant plus im-
portante aujourd’hui que je m’intéresse à la métaphysique aristotélicienne. Pour Aristote,
le bord est principe d’individuation. La statue de marbre est matière dans le bloc d’où le
sculpteur l’a tirée, mais c’est son bord qui définit sa forme.
important since I was immersed into Aristotelian metaphysics. For

Aristotle, a being, in general, is what is here, separated. It pos-
sesses a boundary, it is separated from the ambiant space. In other
words, the boundary of an object is its form. A concept has also
a boundary, viz. the definition of that object. On the other hand,
this idea that the boundary defines the object is not completely
exact for a topologist. It is only true in the usual space. But the
fact remains that, starting from this notion of boundary, I devel-
oped a few mathematical theories that were useful to me; then I
looked into the applications, that is, on the possibilities of sending
a space into another one, in a continuous manner. From here, I
was led to study cusps and folds, objects that have a mathematical
meaning.57
Let us return to the Stokes formula. It establishes a precise relation be-
tween a domain and its boundary. In his article Aristote topologue [47]
(1999), Thom writes that one can interpret a passage of Aristotle’s Physics
in which he talks about the “minimal limit of the enveloping body”58 as the
homological Stokes formula: d ◦ d = 0, the dual of the usual Stokes formula,
concerning differential forms and expressing the fact that the boundary of
the boundary is empty. “This formula, he writes, essentially expresses the
closed character of a human being. Because if there is boundary, then there
is blood loss, with a threat to life. Hence the role of the operator d2 = 0
from homological algebra as an ontology detector, and its profound biological
interpretation.”59 This identification of the Stokes formula with a formula in
Aristotle was already carried on in his 1991 article Matière, forme et catas-
trophes [43, p. 381]. In the series of interviews Prédire n’est pas expliquer
(1991), he also talks about the homological Stokes formula d2 = 0 and his
biological interpretation: “The boundary of the boundary is empty; this is
the great axiom of topology and of differential geometry in mathematics,
but it is an expression of the spacial integrity of the boundary of the or-
ganism.”60 [45, p. 111] We recall incidentally that the Stokes formula is the
basis tool in the proof of the theorem stating that the characteristic numbers
57“En vérité, il existe une réelle unité dans ma réflexion. Je ne la perçois qu’aujourd’hui,
après y avoir beaucoup réfléchi, sur le plan philosophique. Et cette unité, je la trouve dans
cette notion de bord. Celle de cobordisme lui est liée. [. . . ] La notion de bord est d’autant
plus importante que j’ai plongé dans la métaphysique aristotélicienne. Pour Aristote, un
être, en général, c’est ce qui est là, séparé. Il possède un bord, il est séparé de l’espace
ambiant. En somme, le bord de la chose, c’est sa forme. Le concept, lui aussi, a un bord
: c’est la définition de ce concept. Cette idée que le bord définit la chose n’est d’ailleurs
pas tout à fait exacte pour un topologue. Ce n’est vrai que dans l’espace usuel. Il reste
que, partant de cette notion de bord, j’ai développé, quelques théories mathématiques qui
m’ont servi ; puis je me suis penché sur les applications, c’est-à-dire sur les possibilités
d’envoyer un espace dans un autre, de manière continue. J’en ai été amené à étudier les
fronces et les plis, objets qui ont une signification mathématique.”
58Physics [1] 211b11.
59La formule explique essentiellement le caractère clos de l’être vivant. Car s’il y a un
bord, il y a perte de sang, avec menace pour la vie. D’où le rôle de détecteur d’ontologie
qu’est l’opérateur bord d2 = 0 de l’algèbre homologique et de sa profonde interprétation
biologique.”
60Le bord du bord est vide ; c’est le grand axiome de la topologie, de la géométrie dif-
férentielle en mathématiques, mais cela exprime l’intégrité spatiale du bord de l’organisme.
of two cobordant manifolds, computed from the tangent bundles, coincide,

and that the great theorem of Thom, the one for which he was awarded the
Fields medal, is the converse of this one.
We should also talk about the relation between the local and the global
in biology, and in particular, the problems of “local implies global” type.
Thom declares in his 1992 interview on catastrophe theory [46] that the
big problem of biology is the relation between the local and the global, that
this is a philosophical problem which has to do with “extent” and that, at the
same time, it is the object of topology. Catastrophe theory has something
to say about the common features of the evolution of the form of a wave, of
a cloud, of a living cell, of a fish and of any other living being, but also on
the question of how does morphogenesis—the birth of form—affect the later
development of a form. This is the biological counterpart of the question
of how the local implies the global. Thom, in the interview, recalls that
topology is essentially the study of the ways that make a relation between
a given local property and a global property to be found, or conversely:
given a global property of a space, to find its local properties, around each
point. He concludes by saying that there is a profound methodological unity
between topology and biology.
Talking about Aristotle in a mathematical context, one is tempted to say a
few words about the logic he founded, the so-called Aristotelian logic, which
is different from the abstract mathematical logic—a 19th century invention.
Thom had his own ideas on the matter, and, needless to say, if the question
of which among the two logics is more suitable to science may be raised, his
preference goes to Aristotelian logic. We leave to him the final word of this
section, from his article Aristote et l’avènement de la science moderne, [44,
p. 489]:
Aristotle had perfectly understood that there is no pertinent logic
without an ontology which serves for it as foundations. In other
words, if a logic may serve to describe in an efficient way certain
aspects of the real world, if logical deduction is a reflexion of the
behavior of real phenomena, then, that logic must necessarily be
connected with the reality of the external world. And indeed, it is
very clear that Aristotle’s logic was one with his physics. [. . . ] I will
say in most formal way that the so-called progress of logic, realized
since the appearance in the 19th century of formal logic with Boole
were in fact Pyrrhic progresses, in this sense that which we gained
from the point of view of rigor, we lost it from the point of view of
pertinence. Logic wanted to be separate of any ontology, and, for
that, it became a gratuitous construction, in some way modeled
on mathematics, but such an orientation is even less justified than
in the case of mathematics.61
61Aristote avait parfaitement compris qu’il n’y a pas de logique pertinente sans une
ontologie qui lui sert de fondement. Autrement dit, si une logique peut servir à décrire
efficacement certains aspects du réel, si la déduction logique est un reflet du comportement
des phénomènes réels, eh bien, c’est que la logique doit nécessairement avoir un rapport
avec la réalité du monde extérieur. Et il est bien clair en effet que la logique d’Aristote
faisait corps avec sa physique. [. . . ] Je serai tout à fait formel en disant que les prétendus
progrès de la logique, réalisés depuis l’apparition de la logique formelle avec Boole au XIXe
siècle, ont été en fait des progrès à la Pyrrhus, en ce sens que ce qu’on a gagné du point
5. On form
Thom was thoroughly involved in questions of morphogenesis. In his ar-
ticle Matière, forme et catastrophes, he recalls that it was in 1978 that for
the first time he made the connection between catastrophe theory and Aris-
totle’s hylemorphism theory. In the foreword to his Esquisse, he writes [42,
p. viii]: “I knew of course that the hylomorphic schema—of which I make use
in the catastrophe formalism—originated in the Stagirite’s work.” Aristotle’s
theory of hylemorphism is discussed thoroughly in the Esquisse. According
to that theory, every being (whether it is an object or a living being) is
composed in an inseparable way of a matter (hylé, ὕλη)62 and form (mor-
phê, μορφή). Matter, from this point of view, is a potentiality, a substrate
awaiting to receive form in order to become a substance—the substance of
being, or being itself. In the Metaphysics, we can read: “I call form the
essential being and the primary substance of a thing.”63 In the treatise On
the soul, Aristotle states that the soul is the form of a human being.64 In the
Physics, he writes that the φύσις (nature) of a body is its form,65 and that
flesh and bone do not exist by nature until they have acquired their form.66
Matter and form also make the difference between the domain of interest of
a physicist and that of a mathematician. The former, according to Aristotle,
studies matter and form,67 whereas the latter is only concerned with form.68
In the Metaphysics, he writes that mathematical objects constitute a class of
things intermediate between forms and sensibles.69 In another passage of the
Physics,70 he writes that “matter desires form as much as a female desires
a male.” Form, according to him, is what contains, and it may even con-
tain the infinite: “For the matter and the infinite are contained inside what
contains them, while it is form which contains.”71 It also appears clearly in
these writings that Aristotle did not conceive form as a self-contained entity
which lives without matter.
Thom completely adhered to Aristotle’s theory of form, which the latter
expanded especially in his biological treatises. Thom highlighted the impor-
tance of these ideas in biology, and more particularly in embryology, namely,
the idea of a form which tends to its own realization.
The paper L’explication des formes spatiales : réductionnisme ou platon-
isme (The meaning of spacial forms: reductionism or platonism) (1980) [38]
by Thom concerns the notion of form and its classification. Thom tried there
de vue de la rigueur, on l’a perdu du point de vue de la pertinence. La logique a voulu se
séparer de toute ontologie et, de ce fait, elle est devenue une construction gratuite, un peu
sur le même modèle que les mathématiques, mais une telle orientation est encore moins
motivée que dans le cas des mathématiques.
62
The word ὕλη, before Aristotle, designated shapeless wood, and the introduction of
this word in philosophy is due to Aristotle himself.
63
Metaphysics [8] 1032b1-2.
64
On the soul, [6] 412a11.
65
Physics [1] 193a30.
66
Physics [1] 193b.
67
Metaphysics [8] 1037a16-17 and Physics [1] 194a15.
68
Posterior analytics [4], 79a13.
69
Metaphysics [8] 1059b9.
70
Physics [1] 192a24.
71
Physics [1] 207a35.
to give a mathematical basis to phenomenal concepts. In this setting, the

substrate of a morphology is the four-dimensional Euclidean space. From a
mathematical point of view, a form is then a closed subset of space-time72
up to a certain equivalence relation, and, for him, one of the fundamental
problems in morphology is to make precise, from the mathematical point of
view, this equivalence relation. In biology, Thom talks about a “congruence
in the sense of D’Arcy Thompson” [49]. The relation satisfies certain metri-
cal constraints which, he says, “are generally impossible to formalize.” This
is, he says, the problem that biometrics has to solve: for instance, to char-
acterize a certain bone of a given animal species. The problem is obviously
open, but Thom adds that often, some subtle psychological mechanisms of
form recognition will allow one to decide almost immediately whether two
objects have the same form or not.
In the introduction to the course his 1980 Solignac course [37], Thom
says that biology is a morphological discipline, concerned with form, and
topology, as a branch of mathematics which involves the study of form, is
at the basis of theoretical biology. From his point of view, there are two
steps in a morphological discipline: the classification—giving names to the
various forms, the identification of stable forms, etc.—and, after that, the
theorization, namely, building a theory which is “generative” in the sense
that it confers to certain forms (or agregates of form) a certain power of de-
termining other forms which are close to them. This program, says Thom,
is partially realized in linguistics, which he also considers as a morpholog-
ical discipline. In 1971, he published an essay on the subject, Topologie et
linguistique 73 [32] in which he develops a general theory of linguistics based
on topology and where the accent is on morphology, again in a pure Aris-
totelian tradition. Thus, like biology, linguistics is, for Thom, part of the
general theory of forms. A sentence, a phrase, whether it is written or oral,
is, according to him, a form. More than that, morphology is what unifies
language—a complicated process whose study pertains at the same time to
physiology, psychology, sociology, and other fields.
In his article Aristote et l’avènement de la science moderne (1991), dis-
cussing the relation between Aristotle and modern science, Thom writes [44,
p. 491ff]:
I belong to those who think the the hylemorphic schema is still
valid, because it is equivalent to the classifying role of concept in
the verbal description of the world. [. . . ] I am convinced that dur-
ing the last years, in several disciplines, there appeared situations
that can be explained by the presence of local fields or forms and
that absolutely justify the old Aristotelian hylemorphic model, ac-
cording to which nature is in some sense captured by form. Of
course, I do not hide myself the fact that here, Aristotelian form,
the “eidos”, was a being that had nothing mathematical. It was an
entity that carried its own “energeia”, its activity, and it is clear
72
Thom speaks of space-time in the classical sense, that is, a four-dimensional space
whose first three coordinates represent space and the fourth one time. This is not the
space-time that is used in the theory of relativity.
73
This article was published five years later in Russia, with an introduction by Yuri
Manin.
that, tor Aristotle, form did not have the status of a mathemati-
cal object that would have led him to a certain form of Platonism.
The fact remains that the Aristotelian “eidos” has a certain efficient
virtue which, anyway, one has to explain, and in the theories of
modern science which I am alluding to, the efficiency of the “eidos”
is expressed in mathematical terms, for instance using structural
stability.74
The book Structural stability and morphogenesis starts with a Program
in which Thom presents the problem of succession of forms as one of the
central problems of human thought. He writes:
Whatever is the ultimate nature of reality (assuming that this
expression has a meaning), it is indisputable that our universe is
not chaos. We perceive beings, objects, things to which we give
names. These beings or things are forms or structures endowed
with a degree of stability; they take up some part of space and last
for some period of time. [. . . ] we must concede that the universe
we see is a ceaseless creation, evolution, and destruction of forms
and that the purpose of science is to foresee this change of form,
and, if possible, to explain it.
In his article Aristote et l’avènement de la science moderne, [44] Thom
declares that since the advent of Galilean physics, which emphasizes mo-
tion in a world in which there is no place for generation and corruption,75
considerations on form disappeared from physics, even though morphology
is present in biology. Modern science, he says, is characterized by the dis-
appearance of this central notion of form, which played a central role in
Aristotle’s ontology ([44, p. 491]).76
Ovid’s Metamorphoses starts with the line: “I want to speak about bodies
changed into new forms.” In Book I, he recounts how gods ended the status
of primal chaos, a “raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly
combined, discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place.” In Hesiod’s
Theogony, chaos is the name of the first of the primordial deities. Then come,
74
Je suis de ceux qui croient que le schème hylémorphique garde toute sa valeur, car
il est l’équivalent du rôle classificateur du concept dans la description verbale du monde.
[. . . ] Je suis convaincu que ces dernières années ont vu dans un assez grand nombre de
disciplines réapparaı̂tre des situations qu’on peut expliquer par la présence de champs
locaux ou de formes et qui justifient tout à fait à mon avis le vieux modèle hylémorphique
d’Aristote, selon lequel la matière en quelque sorte est capturée par la forme. Bien entendu,
je ne me dissimule pas qu’ici la forme aristotélicienne, l’“eidos”, était un être qui n’avait
rien de mathématique. C’était une entité qui portait en elle son “energeia”, son activité,
et il est clair que, pour Aristote, la forme n’avait pas un statut de caractère mathématique
qui l’aurait obligé à une certaine forme de platonisme. Mais il n’en demeure pas moins
que l’“eidos” aristotélicien a une certaine vertu efficace qu’il faut expliquer de toute façon,
et dans les théories de la science moderne auxquelles je fais allusion, l’efficace de l’“eidos”
s’exprime en termes mathématiques, par la théorie de la stabilité structurelle par exemple.
75
This is also a reference to Aristotle’s On generation and corruption [11].
76
“Le monde de Galilée est un monde de mouvement, mais où génération et corruption
n’ont point de place, d’où la disparition quasi totale en physique moderne des considéra-
tions de forme ; il n’y a pas de morphologie inanimée. Bien entendu, en biologie, il y a
par contre de la morphologie. Mais alors, il n’y a plus de mathématique, au moins en tant
qu’instrument de déduction. C’est cette disparition de la notion centrale de forme qui car-
actérise la science moderne, alors que cette notion jouait un rôle central dans l’ontologie
d’Aristote.”
in that order, Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (at the same time a place, the Deep
abyss), and Eros (love).
Chapter 2 of Structural stability and morphogenesis is titled Form and
structural stability. It starts with the question: what is form? The question,
in its various aspects is difficult to answer, and Thom says that it is beyond
his task.
Saying that a form is a geometric figure may be a good start (if one
can be satisfied with not having a definition of a “geometric figure”,77 which,
technically speaking, should depend on what kind of geometry we are talking
about), but then, one has to introduce an equivalence relation. Topological
equivalence (homeomorphism) is certainly too weak, and metric equivalence
(isometry) too restrictive. For example, a homothety will also preserve form.
Thom notes that there are instances where a square drawn in a plane such
that two of its sides are horizontal (and the other two vertical) does not
have the same “form” as a square placed in such a way that its sides make
an angle of 45 degrees with the horizontal. The development of the theory
of forms depends on the use that one wants to make of it, and for Thom,
the main use of this theory is in biology. Although this is the whole subject
of his book Structural stability and morphogenesis, Thom acknowledges that
this is a task whose complete realization is beyond his capabilities.
Topology is also an adequate language for describing spaces of forms.
Thom considers equivariant Hausdorff metrics on spaces of form. The math-
ematical notions of stability, bifurcation, attractor, singularity, universal un-
folding, envelope, etc. are thoroughly used by him in this setting.
In the article Structuralism and biology [34], which was published the
same year as the French version of Structural stability and morphogenesis,
Thom writes that the foundations of a structure requires a precise lexicon of
elementary chreods and the introduction of the notion of conditional chreod,
and that catastrophe theory gives the mathematical models for such struc-
tures.
One of Thom’s aims in his book Structural stability and morphogenesis
was to introduce in biology the language of differential topology, in par-
ticular basic notions such as differentiable manifold, vector field, generic-
ity, transversality, universal unfolding etc. In the introduction, Thom he
two predecessors of him in this domain, D’Arcy Thompson who we already
mentioned at several occasions, and C. H. Waddington, whose concepts of
“chreod” and “epigenetic landscape” played a germinal part in his work.
Conrad Hal Waddington (1905-1975) , to whom Thom refers, was a well-
known biologist, working on developmental biology, that is, the study of
growth and development of living organisms. The term “chreod” which he
introduced in this field (from the Greek χρή, which means “it is necessary to”
and ὁδός, which means “way”) designates the transformations underwent by
a cell during its development, until it finds its place as part of the organism.
During this development, the cell is subject to an incredible amount of forces
77
Aristotle, in On the soul, [6] 414b19, considers it useless to try to define a “figure”, and
he describes the latter as a “sort of magnitude” (425a18). We already noted that Euclid
defines a figure as “that which is contained by any boundary or boundaries” (Definition
14 of Book I of the Elements). Plato, on the contrary, defines a figure as the boundary of
a solid (Meno 76A).
exerted on it from its environment to which it is permanently adjusting. An

“epigenetic landscape” is a representation of a succession of differentiation
phenomena that a cell undergoes by hills and valleys. The image represented
here is extracted from Waddington’s Strategy of the Genes (1957) [52] where
the gene is represented as a small ball rolling in a golf field. The idea
expressed by this representation is that a tiny change in the initial conditions
leads to drastic changes in the way the rolling ball will take. Waddington’s
main idea was that the development of a cell or an embryo does not depend
only on its origin, but also on the landscape that surrounds it. In his Esquisse
(1988), Thom returns to Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, describing it
as a “metaphor which played a primordial role in catastrophe theory.” [42,
p. 19]
An epigenetic landscape, from C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes,

George Allen & Unwin, 1957, p. 29.
Waddington wrote two prefaces to Thom’s Structural stability and mor-

phogenesis, one for the first French edition, and another one for the English
edition. He writes in the first one [33, p. xix]:
I cannot claim to understand all of it; I think that only a relatively
few expert topologists will be able to follow all his mathematical
details, and they may find themselves less at home in some of the
biology. I can, however, grasp sufficient of the topological con-
cepts and logic to realise that this a very important contribution
to the philosophy of science and to theoretical general biology in
particular. [. . . ] Thom has tried to show, in detail and with pre-
cision, just how the global regularities with which biology deals
can be envisaged as structures within a many-dimensional space.
He not only has shown how such ideas as chreods, the epigenetic
landscape, and switching points, which previously were expressed

only in the unsophisticated language of biology, can be formulated
more adequately in terms such as vector fields, attractors, catastro-
phes, and the like; going much further than this, he develops many
highly original ideas, both strictly mathematical ones within the
field of topology, and applications of these to very many aspects
of biology and of other sciences. [. . . ] It would be quite wrong
to give the impression that Thom’s book is exclusively devoted to
biology. The subjects mentioned in his title, Structural stability
and morphogenesis, have a much wider reference; and he related
his topological system of thought to physical and indeed to gen-
eral philosophical problems. [. . . ] In biology, Thom not only uses
topological modes of thought to provide formal definitions of con-
cepts and a logical framework by which they can be related; he also
makes a bold attempt at a direct comparison between topological
structures within four-dimensional space-time, such as catastrophe
hypersurfaces, and the physical structures found in developing em-
bryos. [. . . ] As this branch of science [theoretical biology] gath-
ers momentum, it will never in the future be able to neglect the
topological approach of which Thom has been the first significant
advocate.
Another mathematician who could have been invoked in the preceding
pages is Leonardo da Vinci, who is the model—probably the supreme model—
for a rare scientist-artist combination. Leonardo is also the prototype of a
scholar who spent all his life learning. He was a theoretician of form. At
an advanced age, he became thoroughly involved in biology, in particular,
in exploring the ideas of birth and beginning of life. He introduced some
of the first known theories on the fetus. One of his notebooks is entirely
dedicated to embryology. He had personal ideas on the role of the umbilical
cord and he developed theories on the nutritional and respiratory aspects
of the embryo, as well as on its rate of change in form during the various
phases of its growth.
Leonardo was famous for taking a long time for the execution of the works
that the various patrons ordered to him, and it is interesting to know that
he was blamed for spending more time on studying mathematics than on
painting. Gabriel Séailles, his famous 19th century biographer, in his book
Léonard de Vinci, l’artiste et le savant : 1452-1519 : essai de biographie
psychologique [31], quotes a letter from the Reverend Petrus de Nuvolaria
to Isabelle d’Esté, Duchess of Milan, who was a leading figure of the Italian
Renaissance, in which he says about Leonardo: “His mathematical studies
were, for him, the cause of such a disgust for painting that he barely stands
holding a brush.”78 Séailles also quotes Sabba da Castiglione, a writer and
humanist who his contemporary, who writes in his memoirs: “Instead of
dedicating himself to painting, he gave himself fully to the study of geometry,
architecture and anatomy.”
Leonardo was a dedicated reader of Aristotle. The Renaissance was, in
great part, a return to the Greek authors and in this sense, Thom was, like
78Ses études mathématiques l’ont à ce point dégoûté de la peinture, qu’il supporte à

peine de prendre une brosse.
Leonardo, the prototype of the Renaissance man. Not only he participated

in the renewed interest in Aristotle’s work, but he shed a new light on it,
helping us understanding better his biology and his mathematics.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Marie-Pascale Hautefeuille who read

several versions of this paper and made corrections, to Stelios Negrepontis
who read an early version and shared with me his thoughts on Plato that are
included in the appendix that follows this paper, and to Arkady Plotnitsky
who made extremely helpful comments on an early version. Part of this
paper was written during a stay at the Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre
of Tsinghua University (Beijing).
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Athanase Papadopoulos, Université de Strasbourg and CNRS, 7 rue René

Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France, and Yau Mathematical Sciences
Center, Tsinghua University, Jin Chun Yuan West Building, Haidian District,
Beijing 100084, China
E-mail address: [email protected]
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Topology and biology: From Aristotle to Thom

Preprint · November 2018

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Abstract. René Thom discovered several refined topological notions

considered that some of the assertions of the Greek philosophers have a

AMS classification: 03A05, 01-02, 01A20, 34-02, 34-03, 54-03, 00A30,

Date: November 26, 2018.

calculus. Such a study, which would be interesting to carry on,

1“Les notions de limite et de continuité remontent à l’antiquité ; on ne saurait en faire

by continuous, which is a mistake, because this word rather refers to (arc-

describe and classify such complicated, and diagnostic, patterns as

3. Aristotle, mathematician and topologist

boundary.” The notion of boundary is omnipresent in this discussion. Thom

We ought to try to make our investigations such as will render an

it—using homological considerations. More precisely, he saw there a version

33History of animals [12] 487a.

soul), unique in potentiality, into a multitude of part souls in ac-

34History of animals [12] 589b30 ff.

epistemological break brought to science a radical progress, anni-

As a final remark on mathematics in Aristotle, I would like to recall his

Homeomorphisms preserving stratifications, from D’Arcy Thompson’s On growth

Chapter 7 of Thom’s Esquisse is called Perspectives in Aristotelian bi-

in which we have considered it since Descartes. We know why: his

important since I was immersed into Aristotelian metaphysics. For

of two cobordant manifolds, computed from the tangent bundles, coincide,

to give a mathematical basis to phenomenal concepts. In this setting, the

exerted on it from its environment to which it is permanently adjusting. An

An epigenetic landscape, from C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes,

Waddington wrote two prefaces to Thom’s Structural stability and mor-

landscape, and switching points, which previously were expressed

78Ses études mathématiques l’ont à ce point dégoûté de la peinture, qu’il supporte à

Leonardo, the prototype of the Renaissance man. Not only he participated

Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Marie-Pascale Hautefeuille who read

[18] J. Dieudonné, Pour l’Honneur de l’esprit humain : les mathématiques aujourd’hui,

[42] R. Thom, Esquisse d’une sémiophysique : Physique aristotélicienne et théorie des

Athanase Papadopoulos, Université de Strasbourg and CNRS, 7 rue René

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