Len Fisher, Ph.D.

Australian-born (1942), Len Fisher, Ph.D., has been lucky enough to have a career in science that let him indulge his fascination for how small objects like living cells can "self-assemble" to form complex structures such as our bodily organs. These days he divides his time between England's West Country and the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, where he writes books designed to make science accessible by showing how scientists think about the problems of life. He started with little problems, such as using physics to work out the best way to dunk a biscuit. This created a lot of publicity, and landed him with an IgNobel Prize in 1999. It also set him out on a book writing career.

His first book "How to Dunk a Doughnut" was named the Best Popular Science Book of the Year by the American Institute of Physics in 2004. It dealt with the little problems of life, including how to catch a ball and how to use hand tools. His latest book "The Perfect Swarm" deals with the much bigger problem of using scientific thinking to steer our way through the increasingly complex situations of life. It was inspired by his early work on "self-assembly" and especially by the phenomenon of swarm intelligence, where simple rules of interaction between close neighbors can produce immensely complex patterns in the community as a whole (think of the movements of birds in flocks or fish in shoals). He asks the converse question: If simple rules produce complex situations, can we use these or equally simple rules to understand and manoeuvre our way through those situations?