On growth and form: geometry, physics and biology

Speaker: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan

Date: Thu, May 24, 2012

Location: PIMS, University of British Columbia

Conference: 2012 Niven Lecture

Subject: Mathematics, Mathematical Biology

Class: Scientific

Abstract:

The diversity of form in living beings led Darwin to state that it is "enough to drive the sanest man mad". How can we describe this variety? How can we predict it? Motivated by biological observations on different scales from molecules to tissues, I will show how a combination of biological and physical experiments, mathematical models and simple computations allow us to begin to unravel the physical basis for morphogenesis.