| Alan Turing approached the question of the generation of form
in living beings with the same type of rigour which he demonstrated in other
areas of his scientific career. He used the mathematical techniques at his
disposal, but he was innovative in the way that he applied them. The aim of
this article is to provide a contribution to the knowledge of what constituted
that innovation. Through his incursion in biology, Turing ended up giving
us essential tools for the understanding of complexity in the natural world.
keywords: Alan Turing; morphogenesis; patterns in biology; reaction-diffusion; emergence; self-organization; bifurcations. |