This volume is the record and product of two International Symposia on the Appli- cation of Catastrophe Theory and Topological Concepts in Physics, held in May and December 1978 at the Institute for Information Sciences, University of TUbingen. The May Symposium centered around the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Professor Rene Thom, Paris, by the Faculty of Physics of the University of TUbingen in recognition of his discovery of universal structure principles and the new di- mension he has added to scientific knowledge by his pioneering work on structural stability and morphogenesis....