D'Arcy W Thompson - Collected Quotes

"It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things." (D'Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"Numerical precision is the very soul of science." (D'Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The concept of an average, the equation to a curve, the description of a froth or cellular tissue, all come within the scope of mathematics for no other reason than that they are summations of more elementary principles or phenomena. Growth and Form are throughout of this composite nature; therefore the laws of mathematics are bound to underlie them, and her methods to be peculiarly fitted to interpret them." (D'Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The rate of growth deserves to be studied as a necessary preliminary to the theoretical study of form, and organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time. […] We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space."  (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"To seek not for end but for antecedents is the way of the physicist, who finds "causes" in what he has learned to recognise as fundamental properties, or inseparable concomitants, or unchanging laws, of matter and of energy." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)