When D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson turned 40 in 1900, he was a frustrated man. He was stuck working as a marine biologist at the University of Dundee, and his colleagues saw him as a dilettante, an unproductive oddball in two fields. His biological papers, motivated as they were by a sceptical attitude towards evolution, were rejected as often as those in the classics, his other great love.

By the time he died in 1948, all that had changed. He had been acclaimed by his peers, and knighted by the king. More importantly, he had woven the diverse strands of his scholarship into something greater than the sum of its parts. Thompson read and pondered everything, and saw no difference between different branches, or eras, of scholarship: ‘A fact discovered yesterday,’ he once wrote, ‘is balanced by the history of two thousand years.’ Using this approach, he pioneered the application of maths and physics to biological problems, in the process yielding a new way of thinking about life, and a new type of explanation in biology. And he wrote what has been called ‘beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue’.

Even in his time, Thompson’s work made little direct impact on biology, and today, much of his thinking still seems eccentric. But some of his ideas are stronger than ever, and we can only gawp at the breadth of his learning. Arguably, he worked during the last period in history when it was possible to think like this and still be a professional scientist.

Dr John Whitfield is a London-based science writer, whose work appears regularly in Nature and other publications. His book In the beat of a heart: life, energy and the unity of nature was published last autumn. In it – taking D’Arcy Thompson as a guiding spirit – he looks at the idea that a single theory, based on an understanding of how life uses energy, can explain much of the pattern and diversity of the living world, from species diversity to lifespan.

In association with the Royal College of Surgeons of England