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
practically every honor of the mathematical community, over twenty
honorary degrees, the National Science Medal, the Legion of Honor of
France, ..."