author
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
1860–1948
A pioneering thinker who brought mathematics, physics, and natural history together, he is best remembered for On Growth and Form, a book that changed how many readers understood the shapes of living things. His work still feels fresh because it looks at nature with both scientific rigor and deep curiosity.
2 Audiobooks
On Growth and Form
by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The Cambridge natural history, Vol. 04 (of 10)
by Geoffrey Smith, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Cecil Warburton, Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, Henry Woods
About the author
Born in Edinburgh on May 2, 1860, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson became a Scottish zoologist, classicist, and mathematical thinker whose career crossed several fields at once. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went on to teach for many years at University College, Dundee, before later holding a chair at St Andrews.
Thompson is most closely associated with On Growth and Form (1917; revised 1942), the book that made his reputation. In it, he argued that the forms of living things could often be better understood through mathematics and physical law, an approach that helped make him an early and influential figure in theoretical biology.
He was also known for his wide learning beyond biology, including classical scholarship, and for expeditions that took him as far as the Bering Strait. Thompson died at St Andrews on June 21, 1948, but his ideas continued to influence generations of biologists, mathematicians, designers, and readers interested in the patterns of the natural world.