Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE (2 May 1860 – 21 June 1948) was a Scottish biologist, mathematician and classics scholar.

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 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".

[13] He took the opportunity to collect many valuable specimens for his museum, one of the largest in the country at the time, specialising in Arctic zoology, through his links to the Dundee whalers.

The D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum still has (in 2012) the Japanese spider crab that he collected,[14] and the rare skeleton of a Steller's Sea Cow.

[18][page needed] 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.

[20] In Country Life magazine in October 1923, he wrote: "This is but a little town, and our lives are somewhat narrow who dwell therein; but its traditions are not lost, nor the lessons of its long history thrown away.... the stones cry out to us as we pass.... only last week I went down to the little ancient church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris, and passed through it to stand for a moment (as I often do) in the deserted garden whence one looks across the river and gets the finest view of all of Notre Dame.... here have been civilization, religion and learning for a few short centuries longer than in St Andrews.... yet these two spots have a like influence on my mind and rejoice my heart with a train of shadowy memories.

It was not the first translation of the book into English, but the earlier attempts by Thomas Taylor (1809) and Richard Cresswell (1862) were inaccurate, and criticised at the time as showing "not only an inadequate knowledge of Greek, but an extremely imperfect acquaintance with zoology".

[22] 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 ..

[24][25] The central theme of the book is that biologists of its author's day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics.

[27] Instead, he advocated structuralism as an alternative to natural selection in governing the form of species, with a hint that vitalism was the unseen driving force.

Rates vary, proportions change, and the whole configuration alters accordingly.Using a mass of examples, Thompson pointed out correlations between biological forms and mechanical phenomena.

[36] For his revised On Growth and Form, he was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1942.

[38] On Growth and Form has inspired thinkers including the biologists Julian Huxley, Conrad Hal Waddington and Stephen Jay Gould, the mathematicians Alan Turing and René Thom,[39] the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and artists including Richard Hamilton,[40][41] Eduardo Paolozzi,[40] and Ben Nicholson with his ideas on the mathematical basis of the forms of animals, and perhaps especially on morphogenesis.

[42] Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called it "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".

A teaching collection was retained and forms the core of the University of Dundee's current D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.

[51][52] In 1892 D'Arcy Thompson donated Davis Straits specimens of crustaceans, pycnogonids, and other invertebrates to the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology.