How Alan Turing Cracked Nature’s Code

What does the formation of galaxies have to do with oceanic migratory patterns and embryos? The answer may surprise you: Alan Turing.

If you’re interested in math, you probably already know Alan Turing, and if you don’t, you should. Alan Turing was an ingenious mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptist. He is without doubt the forefather to computers, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and theoretical computer science; he utilized his cryptology skills during World War II to help the Allies defeat the Nazis in many key battles, including the longest continuous military campaign of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic. This could easily be a manifesto on Alan Turing’s mainstream contributions but the focus of this article will be on perhaps one of the most interesting — although shrouded — codes he worked on: that of nature.

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Shortly before his death, Alan Turing was working on finding sufficient basis for a mathematical model that comes up again and again in nature. His research was fruitful, but he died soon thereafter and his ideas were more or less lost up until recently. Turing’s focus was reaction-diffusion systems, and if that sounds scary, don’t worry too much — they’re not as…