Professor Andrzej Herczyński to lead a research program at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2017

Together with colleagues from the UK, France, and the US, Professor Herczyński will be organizing a research program on Growth, Form, and Self-Organisation, to be held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge, England. The program, first proposed in February 2014, was recently approved.

The GFS program, which will run between 22^nd August and 20^th December 2017, is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the publication of the groundbreaking treatise On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948). Thompson’s book, still in print, was the first to bring the tools of mathematics to analyze form of living organisms, from the shape of leaves, shells, and fish to bones, horns, and the human face.

GFS program will host over 100 scientists, who will be working at INI for periods of up to four months, and will include four specialized workshops. It will endeavor to bring diverse aspects of research related to shape selection, deformations, and self-organization into focus, aiming to stimulate new collaborations between mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and other scholars – as well as artists – whose work addresses or depends on the evolution of form, broadly understood.