Math in… Leopard Spots

Alan Turing, best known today as a computer scientist and codebreaker, wrote his last paper on how reaction-diffusion systems can be used to model morphogenesis, the biological process through which organisms develop shapes and patterns.

Two chemicals, an activator and an inhibitor, spread through cells at different rates, creating unique patterns in the tug-of-war their names suggest.

Today, phenomena like leopard spots and zebra stripes are known as Turing patterns. They are modeled using partial differential equations and studied with the help of computer simulations.