From the Introduction: “ Marston Morse was born in 1892, so that he was 33 years old when in 1925 his paper
Relations between the critical points of a real-valued
function of n independent variables
appeared in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Thus Morse grew to maturity just at the time when the subject of Analysis Situs was being shaped by such masters as Poincaré, Veblen, L. E. J. Brouwer, G. D. Birkhoff, Lefschetz and Alexander, and it was Morse's genius and destiny to discover one of the most beautiful and far-reaching relations between this fledgling and Analysis; a relation which is now known as
Morse Theory.
In retrospect all great ideas take on a certain simplicity and inevitability, partly because they shape the whole subsequent development of the subject. And so to us, today, Morse Theory seems natural and inevitable. This whole flight of ideas was of course acclaimed by the mathematical World…it eventually earned him practicallyevery honor of the mathematical community, over twenty honorary degrees, the National Science Medal, the Legion of Honor of France, ...”