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On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, book cover
Mathematics PDF EPUB

On Growth and Form

by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Downloads
100+
First published
1917
Pages
842
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About this book

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson thought biologists had grown too quick to answer every question about an organism's shape with the single word evolution. His 1917 book argues that physics and geometry do much of the work. A jellyfish takes the form of a drop of liquid falling through water, a bird's bone is braced like an engineer's truss, a shell grows along a logarithmic spiral, a sunflower head counts in Fibonacci numbers. The best known section shows how the skull of one fish becomes another's when you stretch the grid it is drawn on. Biologists have argued with the book for a century, and nearly everyone who reads it comes away looking at living things a different way.

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About the author

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - BDeBooks
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) was a Scottish biologist, mathematician, and classical scholar who taught for sixty-four years at Dundee and St Andrews. Equally fluent in Greek and geometry, he wrote the book that brought mathematical form into biology and influenced artists and architects as much as scientists.

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Book facts

First published
1917
Reading time
About 20 hours
Pages
842
Language
English
Formats
PDF, EPUB, Read online