Stéphane Douady
Directeur de recherche
Stéphane Douady, research director at CNRS at the MSC Laboratory of Paris Diderot University, was trained in dynamic systems in physics, which show that even with a simple law of evolution, a system, also simple at first, can evolve towards something as complex as desired. This led him to the question of the appearance of form (morphogenesis), in physical systems such as dunes (and the poetry of dune singing), or biological (lungs), especially in plants: the arrangement of the leaves - with the sequence of Fibonacci numbers -, forms leaves, movements of growth of plants. Seeing systems evolve naturally, like sand dunes, led him to ask the question "what is the living?".
