Alan Turing

Turing is famously known as a brilliant mathematician, the father of modern computing and a codebreaker in World War Two. However, one aspect of his story is conspicuous in its absence. Turing used mathematics to formulate a theory of biology which describes many of the beautiful patterns which we see throughout the natural world.

Read a popular science article for more about these patterns

The Turing Pattern Project introduces Turing’s ideas to primary school students and introduces the idea that mathematics can be used to understand the world. Turing’s description of patterns in nature is a visually striking subject that engages children’s mathematical drive and desire for science.

Patterns on animals can be described using mathematics. By zooming in on a picture of an animal, the colours of the pixels can be represented by numbers. In the picture below, darker shades of fur are indicated by higher numbers.

Turing imagined that there are two chemicals inside an animals body and that the concentrations of these chemicals can be represented as a grid of numbers. Performing certain calculations on the grid of numbers causes visual patterns to form.

This mathematics can be broken down into an algorithm that uses just adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, suitable for KS2 and KS3 level arithmetic.