Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (Philip Ball)

Shapes | Flow | Branches

Nature's Patterns is a beautiful and fascinating collection of books; each stands alone, but they build together to form (as summarised in the final section of Branches) a survey of how shape and form arises in the natural world. Ball - who readily confesses to having been inspired by D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form - covers both the patterns and shapes of life and those found in the inorganic world, as in the shapes of convection cells and the spirals of oscillating chemical reactions. Indeed, he shows how the same underlying principles turn out to govern both, for reaction-diffusion patterns in the developing skin of embryos seemingly underly the spots and stripes of animal patterns.

I picked up the hardback set last year but only recently got around to reading them. As it happens, OUP has just brought the set out in paperback, so now is an excellent time to be recommending it. Of interest to anyone who has contemplated the stripes of a zebra, or the pattern of sunflower seeds, or the patterns of eddies in a stream.