Alan Turing's contributions to the field of chemistry: Theory of morphogenesis and interpretation of some chemical reactions

Abstract

We celebrate the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing in 2012. In this article, we want to highlight the relationship between some Turing’s ideas and chemistry. The mathematician Alan Turing, known as one of the fathers of computer science wrote only a paper related to chemistry (in 1952), but it has been fundamental to explain the morphogenesis (the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape) through a chemical reaction and a diffusion process. Many more processes of nature give rise to those known as Turing’s Patterns, as well as spectacular chemical reactions such as the oscillating reactions.