20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Transforming Species Through Mathematics
In 1917 the great Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Thompson wrote a book called On Growth and Form, in the last chapter of which he introduced his famous 'method of transformations'. * He would draw an animal on graph paper, and then he would distort the graph paper in a mathematically specifiable way and show that the form of the original animal had turned into another, related animal. You could think of the original graph paper as a piece of rubber, on which you draw your first animal. Then the tr...D'Arcy Thompson showed how one species could be transformed into another by sketching it on graph paper and distorting it.