Alan Turing might be best known for his work helping to crack Germany’s “Enigma” communications code during the second world war. But he also came up with a theory where patterns can form just through chemical compounds spreading out (diffusing) and reacting with one another. This became known as reaction-diffusion theory for pattern formation.
PhD student James Cass and I recently published a study in Nature Communications that revealed the tail of a sperm, known as a flagellum, generates patterns as it moves – and that these patterns can be described by Turing’s theory.
