The surprising warmth with which we were welcomed there, all those people offering food and drink at the roadside, still fills me with emotion.

... successful (but not brilliantly so)!

... the last year, after the 'victory', was a year of opening, bringing with it the impression of once more living life to the full. Of this rebirth I can recall a sensation of freedom that I found hard to control.

... I have the impression that work was done just a little while later that was greater in depth and sagacity than mine and whose authors were quite as deserving, if not more so, of the medal (such as my co-medallist Klaus Roth). I am thinking too of Barry Mazur's demonstration of the Schönflies conjecture: Every sphere $S^{n-1}$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with regular boundary is the boundary of an $n$-ball. Not to mention the discovery by Milnor of exotic spheres.

... his basic ideas, the grand simplicity of which I have talked of, are of a very geometric and intuitive nature. These ideas have significantly enriched mathematics, and everything seems to indicate that the impact of Thom's ideas - whether they find their expression in the already known or in forthcoming works - is not exhausted by far.

Thom said that the Fields Medal had brought him the freedom to choose what research he wanted to do, and for him that was essential. He began to take the whole of science as his canvas. He was not a theoretical or experimental scientist, in the sense of designing experiments and predicting results, but rather a philosopher of science, writing about the long-term future developments in the sciences that needed to occur.

Relations with my colleague Grothendieck were less agreeable for me. His technical superiority was crushing. His seminar attracted the whole of Parisian mathematics, whereas I had nothing new to offer. That made me leave the strictly mathematical world and tackle more general notions, like the theory of morphogenesis, a subject which interested me more and led me towards a very general form of 'philosophical' biology.

It is a fact that catastrophe theory is dead. But one could say that it died of its own success. It was brought down by the extension from analytical (or algebraic) models to models that were only smooth. For as soon as it became clear that the theory did not permit quantitative prediction, all good minds ... decided it was of no value. When it comes down to it, this extension resulted from B Malgrange's extension of the preparation theorem.

[H]is seminars were often confusing, because his mind tended to leap ahead, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps.

... one-to-one conversations with him were marvellous: if challenged to fill a gap he would often reveal a goldmine. He showed a gentle wit, a great scepticism, and a quiet amusement at the human condition. He had original ideas about everything under the sun. His writings were often provocative in order to stimulate the reader into seeing the truth.