# Differential Growth

**Track:** Advanced Generative Art — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Hard
**Prerequisites:** Arrays of Objects, Vectors: Magnitude & Direction

**In one line:** Repel/attract node chains that subdivide and grow organically.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Differential growth models a chain or mesh of nodes that repel neighbors, attract along their connections, and insert new nodes where the curve stretches—producing the buckling, brain-coral convolutions of a line outgrowing its space. Anders Hoff (inconvergent) is the form's clearest expositor, his hyphae and differential-growth studies tracing the algorithm's debt to biological morphogenesis. The deeper lineage is D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, which argued that organic shape is physics under constraint. Aesthetically the output reads as grown rather than drawn: folded, space-filling, never self-intersecting. The tension between local rules and global form is the entire pleasure.