Vassiliev invariants, discovered around 1989, provided a radically new way of looking at knots. The notion of finite type (a.k.a. Vassiliev) knot invariants was independently invented by V. Vassiliev and M. Goussarov around 1989. Vassiliev's approach is based on the study of discriminants in the (infinite-dimensional) spaces of smooth maps from one manifold into another. By definition, the discriminant consists of all maps with singularities.
