ON GROWTH AND FORM CENTENARY CONFERENCE
100 years and still growing!
13-14 October 2017
University of Dundee and University of St Andrews

2017 marks 100 years since the publication of D’Arcy Thompson’s landmark 
book On Growth and Form – "the greatest work of prose in twentieth 
century science" (Stephen Jay Gould), written by possibly "the most 
learned polymath of all time" (Richard Dawkins).

One of the key works at the intersection of science and the imagination, 
it is a book that has inspired scientists, artists and thinkers as 
diverse as Alan Turing, C H Waddington, Claude Lévi Strauss, Norbert 
Wiener, Henry Moore and Mies van der Rohe. It pioneered the science of 
biomathematics, and has had a profound influence in art, architecture, 
anthropology, geography, cybernetics and many other fields.

To mark the occasion, a two-day interdisciplinary conference is being 
organised at the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews, where D’Arcy 
spent most of his career and where his surviving collections are held. 
It will feature a range of presentations covering every aspect of 
D’Arcy’s own work and the various fields that it has influenced. The 
conference will also include visits to the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology 
Museum and the Bell Pettigrew Museum of Natural History and there will 
be a special preview of a new exhibition exploring On Growth and Form 
and its legacy.

We would like to invite you to submit proposals for any of the following:
• 30-40 min presentations giving an overview of D’Arcy’s influence in a 
particular field (e.g. cybernetics or anthropology)
• 20 min papers focusing on a more specific area of influence – e.g. a 
particular research area (past or present) that has been illuminated by 
his ideas, or a particular aspect of D’Arcy’s own career
• 10 min spotlight talks describing your own current research in an area 
that connects to D’Arcy’s work
• Themed sessions combining three 20 min or six 10 min presentations, as 
outlined above. Session chairs would be expected to get commitment from 
individual speakers in advance of their submission, and provide separate 
abstracts for each.

Proposals should take the form of an abstract of not more than 300 
words, which should be sent to Matthew Jarron, University of Dundee 
Museum Services on [log in to unmask] by 2 May 2017.

ADDITIONAL EVENT

The conference will be followed by a Newton Institute workshop hosted by 
the University of Dundee 16-20 October 2017 on Growth, Form and 
Self-Organisation in Living Systems – see
https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/gfsw02

-- 
Colin Johnson ([log in to unmask]),
Associate Dean (Graduate Studies), Faculty of Sciences,
Reader, School of Computing,
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/cgj