Ri: Science’s most successful failure April 18, 2007

"When D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson turned 40 in 1900, he was a frustrated man. He was stuck working as a marine biologist at the University of Dundee, and his colleagues saw him as a dilettante, an unproductive oddball in two fields. His biological papers, motivated as they were by a sceptical attitude towards evolution, were rejected as often as those in the classics, his other great love.

By the time he died in 1948, all that had changed. He had been acclaimed by his peers, knighted by the king and, it's said, offered his pick of chairs in biology, classics and maths. But his real achievement was to weave the strands of his learning into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Thompson pioneered the application of maths and physics to biological problems, in the process yielding a new way of thinking about life, and a new type of explanation in biology. And he attained scientific immortality by refracting these ideas through his classical scholarship and expressing them in his book On growth and form, described as 'beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue'."

One of three talks in the Polymaths Series, programmed In association with the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Official Website: http://www.rigb.org/rimain/calendar/detail.jsp?&id=326