Reading your review of Philip Ball’s Shapes: Nature’s Patterns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) I cannot but remember Peter Stevens’ Patterns in Nature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), which has been out of print for a while now (“Patterns of Evolution,” March 7, 2009). Stevens was a member of the Philomorphs, an informal group of lovers of form, established at Harvard in the early Seventies by Stephen Gould, Cyril Smith, Arthur Loeb, Michael Woldenberg, and myself. As these names would suggest, from the very start the group attracted biologists, metallurgists, crystallographers, geographers, mathematicians, and architects because it was perfectly obvious that generators of form cannot be subsumed under any one of these disciplines, each of which had something to contribute to our understanding of the subject. Which seems to be the main point of Ball’s new book. Welcome to the Philomorphs!