D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

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D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (born May 2, 1860 in Edinburgh , † June 21, 1948 in St Andrews ) was a British mathematician and biologist .

life and work

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born the son of a Greek professor. His mother died in childbirth and he grew up partly with his father and partly with his maternal uncle, Joseph Gamgee, who was a biochemist and interested him in science from an early age. From 1877 he studied medicine in Edinburgh , but switched to zoology in Cambridge three years later . In 1884 he became professor of zoology and natural history in Dundee , where he built up a zoological collection. As a member of a commission to investigate the seal trap, he made frequent trips to the Arctic and visited the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea in 1896/1897 . He was in the Scottish Fisheries Commission and for Great Britain in the International Commission for the Exploration of the Oceans from 1902. In Dundee he was also socially engaged and took care of the renovation of houses in slum areas. From 1917 he was professor of natural history at St Andrews . From 1916 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), of which he was Vice President from 1931 to 1933. In 1946 he received her Darwin Medal. From 1934 to 1939 he was President of the Edinburgh Royal Society. In 1937 he was ennobled.

Thompson is often called the "First Biomathematician ". His fame is based on the book "On Growth and Form", the first edition of which appeared in 1917 (German "About Growth and Form"). His central thesis in the book is that his contemporaries overestimated the importance of evolution for the shape and structure of living beings and overlooked the influence of mathematics, physics and mechanics. The book uses numerous examples to demonstrate the similarity of biological and mechanical structures, which he related to one another using mathematical transformations . He was not interested in phylogenetic relationships, which can also be seen from the fact that he sometimes develops comparisons from derived forms (e.g. the skull shape of great apes as a transformation of the human skull). Thompson's observations on leaf position in plants and their correlation to the Fibonacci sequence have become a textbook classic.

“On Growth and Form” is part of the descriptive tradition; Thompson himself said of the book: "My book doesn't really need a foreword because it actually is a single foreword from start to finish." Although the book is essentially a collection of observations, rather than trying to find causal explanations, it became one of the most influential biology literature classics, inspiring generations of biologists, architects, artists, and mathematicians.

His classical education was shown e.g. B. in his translation of Aristotle "Historia animalium" and in his Greek dictionaries for fish and bird names.

Thompson married in 1901 and had three daughters.

Awards

1916 Thompson was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1946 awarded him the Darwin Medal . In 1928 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1943 to the National Academy of Sciences , which had awarded him the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal the year before .

Quote

  • " For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty ." (On Growth and Form, 1917.)

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literature

  • Ruth d'Arcy Thompson: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. The scholar-naturalist 1860-1948. London 1958.

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