[8] In 1958 Thom received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh for the foundations of cobordism theory, which were already present in his thesis.

The proof of the density of topologically stable mappings was completed by John Mather in 1970, based on the ideas developed by Thom in the previous ten years.

A coherent detailed account was published in 1976 by Christopher Gibson, Klaus Wirthmüller, Andrew du Plessis, and Eduard Looijenga.

[20] During the last twenty years of his life Thom's published work was mainly in philosophy and epistemology, and he undertook a reevaluation of Aristotle's writings on science.

In his final years, he turned his attention to an effort to apply his ideas about structural topography to the questions of thought, language, and meaning in the form of a "semiophysics".