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Historically, singularities were first noticed in the study of algebraic curves. The double point at (0, 0) of the curve

${\displaystyle y^{2}=x^{2}+x^{3}}$

and the cusp there of

${\displaystyle y^{2}=x^{3}\ }$

are qualitatively different, as is seen just by sketching. Isaac Newton carried out a detailed study of all cubic curves, the general family to which these examples belong. It was noticed in the formulation of Bézout's theorem that such singular points must be counted with multiplicity (2 for a double point, 3 for a cusp), in accounting for intersections of curves.

It was then a short step to define the general notion of a singular point of an algebraic variety; that is, to allow higher dimensions.

Such singularities in algebraic geometry are the easiest in principle to study, since they are defined by polynomial equations and therefore in terms of a coordinate system. One can say that the extrinsic meaning of a singular point isn't in question; it is just that in intrinsic terms the coordinates in the ambient space don't straightforwardly translate the geometry of the algebraic variety at the point. Intensive studies of such singularities led in the end to Heisuke Hironaka's fundamental theorem on resolution of singularities (in birational geometry in characteristic 0). This means that the simple process of "lifting" a piece of string off itself, by the "obvious" use of the cross-over at a double point, is not essentially misleading: all the singularities of algebraic geometry can be recovered as some sort of very general collapse (through multiple processes). This result is often implicitly used to extend affine geometry to projective geometry: it is entirely typical for an affine variety to acquire singular points on the hyperplane at infinity, when its closure in projective space is taken. Resolution says that such singularities can be handled rather as a (complicated) sort of compactification, ending up with a compact manifold (for the strong topology, rather than the Zariski topology, that is).

While Thom was an eminent mathematician, the subsequent fashionable nature of elementary catastrophe theory as propagated by Christopher Zeeman caused a reaction, in particular on the part of Vladimir Arnold.^[2] He may have been largely responsible for applying the term singularity theory to the area including the input from algebraic geometry, as well as that flowing from the work of Whitney, Thom and other authors. He wrote in terms making clear his distaste for the too-publicised emphasis on a small part of the territory. The foundational work on smooth singularities is formulated as the construction of equivalence relations on singular points, and germs. Technically this involves group actions of Lie groups on spaces of jets; in less abstract terms Taylor series are examined up to change of variable, pinning down singularities with enough derivatives. Applications, according to Arnold, are to be seen in symplectic geometry, as the geometric form of classical mechanics.

An important reason why singularities cause problems in mathematics is that, with a failure of manifold structure, the invocation of Poincaré duality is also disallowed. A major advance was the introduction of intersection cohomology, which arose initially from attempts to restore duality by use of strata. Numerous connections and applications stemmed from the original idea, for example the concept of perverse sheaf in homological algebra.