Reading The Shape Of Nature

Reading the Shape of Nature vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P. Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the personalities of the men most deeply involved are all brought to life. In 1859, Louis Agassiz established the Museum of Comparative Zoology to house research on the ideal types that he believed were embodied in all living forms. Agassiz's vision arose from his insistence that the order inherent in the diversity of life reflected divine creation, not organic evolution. But the mortar of the new museum had scarcely dried when Darwin's Origin was published. By Louis Agassiz's death in 1873, even his former students, including his son Alexander, had defected to the evolutionist camp. Alexander, a self-made millionaire, succeeded his father as director and introduced a significantly different agenda for the museum. To trace Louis and Alexander's arguments and the style of science they established at the museum, Winsor uses many fascinating examples that even zoologists may find unfamiliar. The locus of all this activity, the museum building itself, tells its own story through a wonderful series of archival photographs.

Shapes are everywhere! Shapes in Nature helps introduce young readers to various shapes found in daily life, from a cone on a rhino horn to a hexagon honeycomb. Simple sentences along with large eye-catching photographs help illustrate the 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional shapes found in nature. Prompts for recognizing shapes at the beginning and end of the book help strengthen vocabulary, math comprehension, and critical thinking skills. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Super SandCastle is an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company.

Nature is amazing and filled with different shapes. Learn about the different shapes found in nature. Paired to the fiction title What Can I Make?.

The shape of the moon, the shapes of the stones all around. Let's see what other shapes we can discover in nature.

Seemingly universal geometric forms unite the flow systems of engineering and nature. For example, tree-shaped flows can be seen in computers, lungs, dendritic crystals, urban street patterns, and communication links. In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan considers the design and optimization of engineered systems and discovers a deterministic principle of the generation of geometric form in natural systems. Shape and structure spring from the struggle for better performance in both engineering and nature. This idea is the basis of the new constructal theory: the objective and constraints principle used in engineering is the same mechanism from which the geometry in natural flow systems emerges. From heat exchangers to river channels, the book draws many parallels between the engineered and the natural world. Among the topics covered are mechanical structure, thermal structure, heat trees, ducts and rivers, turbulent structure, and structure in transportation and economics. The numerous illustrations, examples, and homework problems in every chapter make this an ideal text for engineering design courses. Its provocative ideas will also appeal to a broad range of readers in engineering, natural sciences, economics, and business.

Discusses all the shapes found in the natural world and imitated in our material world.

From one of the most highly regarded historians, an original and engrossing chronicle of 19th-century America's infatuation with butterflies and the naturalists who described and named countless new species and unveiled the mysteries of their existence.