On coincidences of Morin and first order Thom--Boardman singular loci

Abstract: It is well-known that the Thom polynomial in Stiefel--Whitney classes expressing the cohomology class dual to the locus of the cusp singularity for codimension-$k$ maps and that of the corank-$2$ singularity for codimension-$(k-1)$ maps coincide. The aim of the present paper is to find out whether there is any geometric explanation to this seemingly mysterious coincidence. We thank L\'aszl\'o Feh\'er for posing us this interesting question that we answer here in the positive, and motivated by it we search for further similar coincidences of the loci of the corank-$r$ and Morin singular points, but found such only for special classes of maps. Finally we compute the cohomology classes dual to the singularity strata for any Morin map. (This result--for holomorphic maps--was presented by Kazarian but the proof was left unpublished.)