It was enjoyable preparing this lecture and, somewhat to my surprise, it turned out to have an Indian vibe - fingerprints having been discovered, or refined, in Janigipur in 1858 and now with the Aadhaar system, the worlds largest biometric systems.
In this lecture I was keen to emphasise that not all biometrics are equal and just because there is a lot of research on, say, face recognition, this does not mean it is viable biometric. As far as I can see, the popularity of face recognition as a biometric is closely coupled with the fact that Microsoft, Amazon and others provide simple and easy to use face recognition APIs. If you want a good biometric then use an Iris scan.