D'Arcy Thompson
b"
One hundred years ago D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a book with a mission to put maths into biology. He showed how the shapes, forms and growth processes we see in the living world aren\\u2019t some arbitrary result of evolution\\u2019s blind searching, but are dictated by mathematical rules. A flower, a honeycomb, a dragonfly\\u2019s wing: it\\u2019s not sheer chance that these look the way they do. But can these processes be explained by physics? D'Arcy Thompson loved nature\\u2019s shapes and influenced a whole new field of systems biology, architects, designers and artists, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Presented by Phillip Ball.
Picture: Corn shell, Getty Images
"