Template:Are You Sure/May 2

• ... that biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a pioneer of mathematical biology; and that his 1917 book On Growth and Form led the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns are formed in plants and animals; and that Thompson's description of the mathematical beauty of nature stimulated thinkers as diverse as Alan Turing and Claude Lévi-Strauss; and artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, and Richard Hamilton?

• ... that mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and academic John Winthrop (1714–1779) attempted to explain the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as a scientific (rather than religious) phenomenon, and that Winthrop was a pioneer of seismology, applying mathematical computation to earthquake activity?

• ... that polymath Athanasius Kircher was one of the first people to observe microbes through a microscope, and that Kircher was ahead of his time in proposing that the plague was caused by an infectious microorganism and in suggesting effective measures to prevent the spread of the disease?