
... there is nothing so enthralling, so grandiose, nothing that stuns or captivates the human soul quite so much as a first course in a science. After the first five or six lectures one already holds the brightest hopes, already sees oneself as a seeker after truth. I too have...

Singularity theory is a far-reaching extension of maxima and minima investigations of differentiable functions, with implications for many different areas of mathematics, engineering (catastrophe theory and the theory of bifurcations), and science. The three parts of...