麻豆社

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鈥檛 some arbitrary result of evolution鈥檚 blind searching, but are dictated by mathematical rules. A flower, a honeycomb, a dragonfly鈥檚 wing: it鈥檚 not sheer chance that these look the way they do. But can these processes be explained by physics? D'Arcy Thompson loved nature鈥檚 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