On Growth and Form

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Sir D'Arcy W. Thompson CB FRS FRSE (1860-1948) was a Scottish biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar. A pioneering mathematical biologist, he is mainly remembered as the author of ON GROWTH AND FORM, an influential work of striking originality and elegance.

The central theme of ON GROWTH AND FORM is that biologists of its author’s day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and under-emphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics. Why do living things and physical phenomena take the form they do? D'Arcy Thompson’s classic On Growth and Form looks at the way things grow and the shapes they take. Analysing biological processes in their mathematical and physical aspects, this historic work, first published in 1917, was described by Peter Medawar who was the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine as the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.