Differentiable Germs and Catastrophes

These notes give a fairly elementary introduction to the local theory of differentiable mappings. Sard''s Theorem and the Preparation Theorem of Malgrange and Mather are the basic tools and these are proved first. There follows a number of illustrations including: the local part of Whitney''s Theorem on mappings of the plane into the plane, quadratic differentials, the Instability Theorem of Thom,...