D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) was Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee and later St Andrews, where his 1917 book On Growth and Form pioneered the mathematical and physical explanation of biological pattern and structure, showing related organisms as geometric transformations of one another. The book influenced thinkers across art, architecture, anthropology, and cybernetics, including Alan Turing, whose 1952 paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” extended Thompson’s morphological questions into reaction–diffusion chemistry.