Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE (2 May 1860 – 21 June 1948) was a Scottish biologist, classicist and mathematician. He was a pioneer of mathematical and theoretical biology, travelled on expeditions to the Bering Strait and held the position of Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee for 32 years, then at St Andrews for 31 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was knighted, and received the Darwin Medal and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal.
Thompson is remembered as the author of the 1917 book On Growth and Form, which led the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns and body structures are formed in plants and animals.
Thompson's description of the mathematical beauty of nature, and the mathematical basis of the forms of animals and plants, stimulated thinkers as diverse as Julian Huxley, C. H. Waddington, Alan Turing, René Thom, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eduardo Paolozzi, Le Corbusier, Christopher Alexander and Mies van der Rohe. He gave the 1918 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on "The Fish of the Sea".
Life
Early life
Thompson was born at 3 Brandon Street in Edinburgh to Fanny Gamgee (sister of Sampson Gamgee) and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1829–1902), Classics Master at Edinburgh Academy and later Professor of Greek at Queen's College, Galway. His mother, Fanny Gamgee (1840–1860), died 9 days after his birth as a result of complications and he was brought up by his maternal grandfather Joseph Gamgee (1801–1895), a veterinary surgeon.
From 1870 to 1877 he attended The Edinburgh Academy and won the 1st Edinburgh Academical Club Prize in 1877. In 1878, he matriculated at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. Two years later, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge to study zoology. As a student at Cambridge, D'Arcy Thompson was first a sizar, and then received a scholarship. because the topic appealed to him. His translation was published in 1883, and included an introduction by Charles Darwin. He speculated later, that if he had chosen to translate Wilhelm Olbers Focke's hybridisation of flowers, he "might have anticipated the discovery of Mendel by twenty years". One of his first tasks was to create a Zoology Museum for teaching and research, now named after him.
In 1885 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Patrick Geddes, Frank W. Young, William Evans Hoyle and Daniel John Cunningham. He served as vice president to the Society from 1916 to 1919 and as president from 1934 to 1939.
In 1896 and 1897, he went on expeditions to the Bering Straits, representing the British Government in an international inquiry into the fur seal industry to assess the fur seal's declining numbers. "Thompson's diplomacy avoided an international incident" between Russia and the United States which both had hunting interests in this area.
His final report for the government drew attention also to the near extinction of the sea otter and whale populations. He became one of the first to press for conservation agreements, and his recommendations contributed to the issuing of species protection orders. He subsequently was appointed Scientific Member of the Fishery Board for Scotland and later, representative to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. and the rare skeleton of a Steller's Sea Cow.
thumb|Thompson was inspired by the work of [[Albrecht Dürer.]]
Whilst in Dundee, Thompson sat on the committee of management of the Dundee Private Hospital for Women. He was a founder member of the Dundee Social Union and pressed for it "to buy four slum properties in the town", which they renovated so that "the poorest families of Dundee could live there."
thumb|upright|Thompson between 1895 and 1905
In 1917, aged 57, Thompson was appointed to the Chair of Natural History at the University of St Andrews, where he remained for the last 31 years of his life. The German British mathematician Walter Ledermann described in his memoir how, as an assistant in Mathematics, he met the biology Professor Thompson at St Andrews in the mid 1930s and how Thompson "was fond of exercising his skills as an amateur of mathematics", that "he used quite sophisticated mathematical methods to elucidate the shapes that occur in the living world" and "[...] differential equations, a subject which evidently lay outside d'Arcy Thompson's fields of knowledge at that time." Ledermann wrote how on one occasion he helped him, working and writing out the answer to his question.
<!--D'Arcy Thompson became a well known and much loved figure in the town, walking its streets in gym shoes with a parrot on his shoulder.-->In Country Life magazine in October 1923, he wrote:
Family
thumb|upright|Thompson, ca. 1906
On 4 July 1901 Thompson married Maureen, elder daughter of William Drury, of Dublin. Thompson's version benefited from his excellent Greek, his expertise in zoology, his "full" knowledge of Aristotle's biology, and his command of the English language, resulting in a fine translation, "correct, free and .. idiomatic".