Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• Action theory
• Actor
• Adaption
• Adaptive system
• Afferent
• AGIL paradigm
• Alchemy
• Analytical chemistry
• Anatol Rapoport
• Anatomy
• Ancient Greek
• Andrew Pickering
• André-Marie Ampère
• Anthony Wilden
• Anthropology
• Anthroposphere
• Applied physics
• Applied science
• Archaeology
• Architecture
• Artificial heart
• Artificial life
• Arturo Rosenblueth
• ASIMO
• Astrobiology
• Astrochemistry
• Astronomy
• Astrophysics
• Atmospheric sciences
• Atomic physics
• Attachment Theory
• Automation
• Behavioural sciences
• Bell Labs
• Benoît Mandelbrot
• Biochemistry
• Biocybernetics
• Bioengineering
• Bioethics
• Biogeography
• Bioinformatics
• Biological system
• Biology
• Bionics
• Biophysics
• Biorobotics
• Biosemiotics
• Biostatistics
• Biotechnology
• Black box
• Botany
• Bourbaki
• Brownian motion
• Buckminster Fuller
• Béla H. Bánáthy
• C. West Churchman
• Cascading failure
• Catastrophe theory
• Category Science
• Category Systems
• Causality
• Cell biology
• Cellular automaton
• Chaos theory
• Charles A S Hall
• Charles François
• Chemical engineering
• Chemistry
• Circuit theory
• Civil engineering
• Claude Bernard
• Claude Shannon
• Cliff Joslyn
• Cognition
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science
• Communication
• Complex system
• Complex systems
• Computer science
• Computer Vision
• Conceptual system
• Connectionism
• Connectivity
• Consciousness
• Conservation biology
• Control system
• Control theory
• Conversation Theory
• Cosmology
• Criminology
• Cryobiology
• Crystallography
• Cultural studies
• Cyberneticist
• Cybernetics
• Cyborgs
• Decision theory
• Deming Prize
• Demography
• Dentistry
• Design Pattern
• Donella Meadows
• Dynamical system
• E.P. Odum
• Earth science
• Earth system science
• Ecology
• Economic system
• Economics
• Ecosphere
• Ecosystem
• Education
• Edward A. Shanken
• Edward Norton Lorenz
• Effective
• Efficacy
• Efficient
• Efficient energy use
• El ??????????
• El Κυβερνήτης
• Embodied cognition
• Emergence
• Emotion
• Engineering
• Epidemiology
• Epistemology
• Ergonomics
• Erich von Holst
• Ethnic studies
• Ethnobiology
• Evolution
• Evolutionary biology
• Experimental physics
• Family therapy
• Feedback
• First Alcibiades
• Food science
• Forestry
• Formal sciences
• Formal system
• France
• Francis Heylighen
• Francisco Varela
• Frederic Vester
• Fringe science
• Gaia hypothesis
• Galactic astronomy
• Game theory
• Genes
• Genetic engineering
• Genetics
• Geochemistry
• Geodesy
• Geology
• Geomorphology
• Geophysics
• George Dantzig
• George Klir
• Gerontology
• Glaciology
• Gordon Pask
• Gordon S. Brown
• Governance
• Government
• Governor (device)
• Green chemistry
• Gregory Bateson
• Harold Stephen Black
• Health
• Health care
• Healthcare science
• Heinz von Foerster
• Henri Atlan
• Hero of Alexandria
• History
• History of science
• Homeostasis
• Homunculus
• Howard T. Odum
• Human anatomy
• Human geography
• Humberto Maturana
• Hunter B. Shirley
• Hydrology
• Igor Aleksander
• Ilya Prigogine
• Immunology
• Industrial Ecology
• Information systems
• Information theory
• Inorganic chemistry
• Interactive Art
• Interdisciplinarity
• Interdisciplinary
• Jacque Fresco
• Jakob von Uexküll
• James Clerk Maxwell
• James Grier Miller
• Jay Forrester
• Jay Wright Forrester
• Jean-Pierre Dupuy
• John N. Warfield
• John von Neumann
• Julian Bigelow
• Kenneth E. Boulding
• Kevin Warwick
• Ktesibios
• Labeling theory
• Law
• Learning
• Library science
• Life
• Life sciences
• Limnology
• Linguistics
• Living systems
• Logic
• Logic modeling
• Louis Couffignal
• Louis Kauffman
• Machine
• Macy Conferences
• Management science
• Margaret Mead
• Marine biology
• Materials science
• Mathematical biology
• Mathematical logic
• Mathematical physics
• Mathematics
• Mechanics
• Medical cybernetics
• Medicine
• Memes
• Memetics
• Metamaterials
• Metric system
• Michael A. Arbib
• Microbiology
• Mihajlo D. Mesarovic
• Military engineer
• Mind-body problem
• Mineralogy
• Mining engineering
• MIT
• Model (abstract)
• Molecular biology
• Molecular physics
• Multi-agent system
• Murray Bowen
• Nancy, France
• Nervous system
• Net.art
• Network theory
• Neural engineering
• Neurocybernetics
• Neuropsychology
• Neuroscience
• New cybernetics
• New Cybernetics
• Nicolas Schöffer
• Niklas Luhmann
• Nonlinearity
• Norbert Wiener
• Nuclear chemistry
• Nuclear engineering
• Nuclear physics
• Nursing
• Oceanography
• Operating system
• Operations research
• Organic chemistry
• Organism
• Organization
• Paleoclimatology
• Paleontology
• Palynology
• Parasitology
• Particle physics
• Pepper moth
• Pharmacy
• Philosophy
• Photochemistry
• Physical chemistry
• Physical geography
• Physical science
• Physical system
• Physics
• Physiology
• Planetary geology
• Planetary science
• Plasma (physics)
• Plato
• Political science
• Political system
• Polycontexturality
• Portal Science
• Project Cybersyn
• Pseudoscience
• Psycho-Cybernetics
• Psychology
• Pyotr Anokhin
• Qian Xuesen
• Quantum mechanics
• Racial Memory
• Radiobiology
• Radiochemistry
• Ratio Club
• Regulatory system
• Richard E. Bellman
• Riots
• Robert Trappl
• Robotics
• Role
• Roy Ascott
• Russell L. Ackoff
• Science
• Science policy
• Science studies
• Scientific method
• Scientific modelling
• Self replication
• Self-organization
• Semiotics
• Sensory system
• Sergei P. Kurdyumov
• Simulation
• Smart mob
• Social control
• Social sciences
• Social system
• Social work
• Sociobiology
• Sociocybernetics
• Sociology
• Software engineering
• Soil biology
• Soil science
• Solar System
• Solid mechanics
• Space science
• Stafford Beer
• Star
• Stereochemistry
• Structure
• Stuart Kauffman
• Stuart Umpleby
• Su Song
• Superorganisms
• Surface science
• Synergetics
• Synergetics (Haken)
• Synthetic Biology
• System
• System Accident
• System dynamics
• System Dynamics
• System theory
• Systematics
• Systems art
• Systems Biology
• Systems biology
• Systems ecology
• Systems engineering
• Systems neuroscience
• Systems psychology
• Systems science
• Systems theory
• Szolem Mandelbrojt
• Talcott Parsons
• Technology
• Telematic art
• Teleology
• Template Cybernetics
• Template Science
• Theoretical biology
• Theoretical physics
• Thermodynamics
• Toxicology
• Transdisciplinarity
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Urban planning
• Valentin Braitenberg
• Valentin Turchin
• Veterinary medicine
• Viable System Model
• W. Edwards Deming
• W. Ross Ashby
• Walter Pitts
• Warren McCulloch
• Water clock
• William Grey Walter
• William Ross Ashby
• World War II
• World-systems theory
• YouTube
• Zoology
• 
  

• 
  Bell Labs
  Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.
  Bell Laboratories operates its headquarters at Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States, and has research and development facilities throughout the world.
  The Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory, also variously known as the Volta Bureau, the Bell Carriage House, the Bell Laboratory and the Volta Laboratory, was created in Washington, D.C. by Alexander Graham Bell.
  In 1880, the French government awarded Bell the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs (approximately US$10,000 at that time, about $250,000 in current dollars) for the invention of the telephone, which he used to found the Volta Laboratory, along with Sumner Tainter and Bell's cousin Chichester Bell. His research laboratory focused on the analysis, recording and transmission of sound. Bell used his considerable profits from the laboratory for further research and education to permit the "[increased] diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf".
  
  wn.com/Bell_Labs
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  France
  France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).
  Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
  
  wn.com/France
• 
  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
  The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
  
  wn.com/United_Kingdom
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  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States

• Anatol Rapoport
  Anatol Rapoport (Russian: Анато́лий Бори́сович Рапопо́рт, born May 22, 1911 – January 20, 2007) was a Russian-born American Jewish mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion.
  Rapoport was born in Lozоvaya, Kharkov Governorate, Russia (in today's Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine). In 1922, he came to the United States, and in 1928 he became a naturalized citizen. He started studying music in Chicago and continued with piano, conducting and composition at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik where he studied from 1929 to 1934. However, due to the rise of Nazism, he found it impossible to make a career as a pianist.
  He shifted his career into mathematics, getting a Ph.D. degree in mathematics under Otto Schilling and Abraham Adrian Albert at the University of Chicago in 1941 on the thesis Construction of Non-Abelian Fields with Prescribed Arithmetic. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, he was a member of the American Communist Party for three years, but quit before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, serving in Alaska and India during World War II.
  
  wn.com/Anatol_Rapoport
• Andrew Pickering
  Andrew Pickering is a sociologist, philosopher and historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of London, and a doctorate in Science Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His book Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics is a classic in the field of the sociology of science.
  In elucidating some of the sociological factors prevailing in particle physics, Pickering also wrote a number of papers for journals and conferences. According to Pickering, theory and experiment come in packages, and traditions of experiment generate just the kind of data which will fuel further theorising, while traditions of theory generate new problems for further development.
  Pickering thus described two theoretical frameworks in particle physics: 'old physics' - which at the time of its death, was "still alive" - dominated high energy physics through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, and concerned itself with 'common [particle physics] phenomena'. 'New physics' refers to the theory and experiment 'package' concerned with rare phenomena, such as the search for quarks. While each theoretical framework had little to say about the other, and "was useless in the phenomenal world of its rival", each was satisfactory in its own terms. Despite this, Pickering also outlined a process of "magical transmutation", where new theories are produced from old, by what he called "analogical recycling". Pickering noted that all this is symptomatic of Kuhnian type revolutions.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Pickering
• Anthony Wilden
  Anthony Wilden (14 December 1935, London, England) is a writer, social theorist, college lecturer, and consultant. Wilden has published numerous books and articles which intersect a number of fields, including systems theory, film theory, structuralism, cybernetics, psychiatry, anthropological theory, water control projects, urban ecosystems, resource conservation, and communications and social relations.
  Wilden is credited with one of the first significant introductions to the work of Jacques Lacan in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in his role as one of Lacan's early English translators. Today and into the 21st century Wilden's work (and consequent reputation) is arguably more influential in the fields of communication theory, ecology and social interaction. These fields of study evolved out of a long scholarly tradition of "interactional semiotics" that originated with Plato's Cratylus. Along with such figures as Gregory Bateson (ie., Steps to an Ecology of Mind), R. D. Laing (ie., Sanity, Madness and the Family), and Walker Percy (ie., Lost in the Cosmos), Wilden is considered one of this tradition's contemporary (modern and postmodern) pioneers.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Wilden
• Arturo Rosenblueth
  Arturo Rosenblueth Stearns (October 2, 1900 – September 20, 1970) was a Mexican researcher, physician and physiologist, who is known as one of the pioneers of cybernetics.
  Rosenblueth was born in 1900 in Ciudad Guerrero, Chihuahua. He began his studies in Mexico City, then traveled to Berlin and Paris where he obtained his medical degree. Returning to Mexico city in 1927, he engaged in teaching and research in physiology. In 1930 he obtained a Guggenheim Scholarship and moved to Harvard University, to the department of Physiology, then directed by Walter Cannon. With Cannon he explored the chemical mediation of homeostasis. Rosenblueth cowrote research papers with both Cannon and Norbert Wiener, pioneer of cybernetics. Rosenblueth was an influential member of the core group at the Macy Conferences.
  In 1944, Rosenblueth became professor of physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Eventually he became head of the Physiology Laboratory of the National Institute of Cardiology, head of the Physiology Department and, in 1961, director of the Center for Scientific Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) at the National Polytechnic Institute.
  
  wn.com/Arturo_Rosenblueth
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  Buckminster Fuller
  Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.
  Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.
  Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he had trouble with geometry, being unable to understand the abstraction necessary to imagine that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented a mathematical point, or that an imperfectly drawn line with an arrow on the end was meant to stretch off to infinity. He often made items from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats.
  
  wn.com/Buckminster_Fuller
• Charles A S Hall
  Charles A.S. Hall is ESF Foundation Distinguished Professor at State University of New York in the College of Environmental Science & Forestry. Hall describes himself primarily as a systems ecologist in the field of Systems ecology with strong interests in biophysical economics, and the relation of energy to society.
  Dr. Hall was trained as a systems ecologist by Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina. Since then he has had a diverse career at Brookhaven Laboratory, The Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Cornell University, University of Montana and, for the last 20 years, at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF). His work has involved streams, estuaries and tropical forests but focused increasingly on human-dominated ecosystems in the US and Latin America. His research reflects his interest in understanding and developing analyses and computer simulation models of the complex systems of nature and humans and their interactions. Halls focus has been on energy as it relates to economics and environment. His focus is studying material and energy flows referred to as Industrial ecology, and applying this perspective, to attempting to understand human economies from a biophysical rather than just social perspective. Dr. Hall teaches a freshman course called The Global Environment and the Evolution of Human Culture and graduate level courses in Systems Ecology, Ecosystems, Energy systems, Tropical Development and Biophysical Economics.
  
  wn.com/Charles_A_S_Hall
• 
  Claude Bernard
  Claude Bernard (12 July 1813 – 10 February 1878) was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur (now known as homeostasis, a term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon). Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations.
  Bernard was born in 1813 in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche-sur-Saône. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyon, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist's shop. His leisure hours were devoted to the composition of a vaudeville comedy, and the success it achieved moved him to attempt a prose drama in five acts, Arthur de Bretagne.
  At the age of twenty-one in 1834 he went to Paris, armed with this play and an introduction to Saint-Marc Girardin, but the critic dissuaded him from adopting literature as a profession, and urged him rather to take up the study of medicine. This advice Bernard followed, and in due course he became interne at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. In this way he was brought into contact with the great physiologist, François Magendie, who was physician to the hospital, and whose official 'preparateur' at the Collège de France he became in 1841.
  
  wn.com/Claude_Bernard
• Claude Shannon
  Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory".
  Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of all time. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis during World War II and afterwards, including basic work on code breaking.
  Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan. His father, Claude Sr (1862–1934), a descendant of early New Jersey settlers, was a self-made businessman and for a while, Judge of Probate. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1890–1945), daughter of German immigrants, was a language teacher and for a number of years principal of Gaylord High School, Michigan. The first 16 years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, Michigan, where he attended public school, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. Shannon showed an inclination towards mechanical things. His best subjects were science and mathematics, and at home he constructed such devices as models of planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a wireless telegraph system to a friend's house half a mile away. While growing up, he worked as a messenger for Western Union. His childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin. Both were descendants of John Ogden, a colonial leader and an ancestor of many distinguished people.
  
  wn.com/Claude_Shannon
• 
  Cliff Joslyn
  Cliff Joslyn (born 1963) is an American cognitive scientist, cyberneticist, and currently Chief Scientist for Knowledge Sciences at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, USA.
  Cliff Joslyn studied at Oberlin College and received a BA in Cognitive Science Mathematics, with High Honors in Cybernetics, in 1985. In 1987 he continued at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where in 1989 he received an MS in Systems Science, and in 1994 under George Klir received a PhD in Systems Science with the thesis "Possibilistic Processes for Complex Systems Modeling".
  From 1994 to 1996 he was an NRC Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. From 1996 to 2007 he was team leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he led the Knowledge and Information Systems Science research team in the Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics (CCS-3) Group of the Computer, Computational, and Statistical Sciences Division. Since 2007 he is Chief Scientist for Knowledge Sciences at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, moving to their Seattle office in 2009.
  
  wn.com/Cliff_Joslyn
• Donella Meadows
  Donella H. "Dana" Meadows (March 13, 1941 Elgin, Illinois, USA - February 20, 2001, Hanover, New Hampshire) was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth, which made headlines around the world.
  Born in Elgin, Illinois, Meadows was educated in science, receiving a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963, and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard in 1968. After a year-long trip with her husband, Dennis Meadows, from England to Sri Lanka and back, she became, along with him, a research fellow at MIT as a member of a team in the department created by Jay Forrester, the inventor of system dynamics as well as the principle of magnetic data storage for computers. She taught at Dartmouth College for 29 years, beginning in 1972.
  Meadows was honored both as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment (1991) and as a MacArthur Fellow (1994). She received the Walter C. Paine Science Education Award in 1990. She also posthumously received the John H. Chafee Excellence in Environmental Affairs Award for 2001 presented by the Conservation Law Foundation.
  
  wn.com/Donella_Meadows
• Edward Norton Lorenz
  Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect.
  Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. He studied mathematics at both Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1942 until 1946, he served as a meteorologist for the United States Army Air Corps. After his return from the war, he decided to study meteorology. Lorenz earned two degrees in the area from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he later was a professor for many years. He was a Professor Emeritus at MIT from 1969 until his death.
  During the 1950s, Lorenz became skeptical of the appropriateness of the linear statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear. His work on the topic culminated in the publication of his 1963 paper Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and with it, the foundation of chaos theory. His description of the butterfly effect followed in 1969,. He was awarded the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences, in the field of earth and planetary sciences, in 1991, the Buys Ballot Award in 2004, and the Tomassoni Award in 2008.^{[citation needed]} In his later years, he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an avid outdoorsman, who enjoyed hiking, climbing, and cross-country skiing. He kept up with these pursuits until very late in his life, and managed to continue most of his regular activities until only a few weeks before his death. According to his daughter, Cheryl Lorenz, Lorenz had "finished a paper a week ago with a colleague." On April 16, 2008, Lorenz died at his home in Cambridge at the age of 90, having suffered from cancer.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Norton_Lorenz
• Erich von Holst
  Erich Walther von Holst (November 28, 1908 – May 26, 1962), was a German behavioral physiologist who was a native of Riga, Livonia and was related to historian Hermann Eduard von Holst (1841–1904). In the 1950s he founded the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology at Seewiesen, Bavaria.
  Holst is remembered for his work with zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) concerning the processes of endogenous generation of stimuli and of central coordination as a basis of behavioral physiology. This idea refuted the existing "reflex theory" which stated that this behavior was based on a chain of reflexes.
  Holst postulated that the basic central nervous configuration consisted of a "cell" permanently producing endogenous stimulation, but prevented from activating its effector by another "cell" that also produced endogenous stimulation which contained an inhibition effect. This inhibiting "second cell" was influenced by the receptor, and stopped its inhibitory functionality precisely at the biologically right moment. In this fashion normal physiological stability was achieved.
  
  wn.com/Erich_von_Holst
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  Francis Heylighen
  Francis Paul Heylighen (born September 27, 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist, and research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels, where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition".
  Francis Heylighen was born on September 27, 1960 in Vilvoorde, Belgium. He got his high school education from the "Koninklijk Atheneum Pitzemburg" in Mechelen, in the section Latin-Mathematics. He received his MSc in mathematical physics in 1982, and his PhD in Sciences in 1987, both from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
  In 1983 he started working as a researcher for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (NFWO). In 1994 he became a tenured researcher at the NFWO and in 2001 a research professor at the VUB. Since 1995 he is affiliated with the VUB’s Center Leo Apostel for interdisciplinary studies. In 2004, he created the ECCO research group which he presently directs.
  In 1989, Valentin Turchin and Cliff Joslyn founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, and Heylighen joined a year later. In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group", an international discussion forum that groups most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence. Heylighen was also one of the founders and former editor of the Journal of Memetics, which terminated in 2008. Thanks to a grant from a private sponsor, in 2012 he founded the Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, becoming its first director.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Heylighen
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  Francisco Varela
  Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001), was a Chilean biologist, philosopher and neuroscientist who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
  Francisco Varela was born in 1946 in Santiago in Chile. After completing secondary school at the Liceo Aleman de Santiago (1951–1963). Like his mentor Humberto Maturana, Varela first studied medicine then biology at the University of Chile, then did a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University. His thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by Torsten Wiesel, was titled Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye.
  After the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, Varela and his family spent 7 years in exile in the USA before returning to Chile to become a Professor of biology.
  Varela became a Tibetan Buddhist in the 1970s, initially studying, together with Keun-Tshen Goba, with the meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Vajradhatu and Shambhala Training, and later with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Nepalese meditation master of higher tantras.
  
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• Frederic Vester
  Frederic Vester (November 23, 1925 – November 2, 2003) was a German biochemist, and an expert in the field of ecology.
  Vester was born in Saarbrücken, and studied chemistry at the universities of Mainz, Paris and Hamburg. From 1955 to 1957 he was postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and Cambridge. From 1957 to 1966 he worked at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, and from 1969 he worked in Munich, first at the Max Planck Institute. In 1970 he founded the private Munich-based Frederic Vester Studiengruppe für Biologie und Umwelt GmbH ("Frederic Vester Study Group for Biology and Environment, Ltd.), renamed Frederic Vester GmbH ("Frederic Vester, Ltd.") after his death.
  From 1982 to 1989 he was a professor at the Bundeswehr University Munich, and from 1989 to 1991 he was Professor for Applied Economics at the Hochschule St. Gallen, Switzerland. Vester's ideas influenced the formation of the environmental movement and the Green Party in Germany. He was a member of the Club of Rome. He was married to Anne Vester. The couple had three children and six grandchildren. He died in Munich.
  
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• George Dantzig
  George Bernard Dantzig (November 8, 1914 – May 13, 2005) was an American mathematical scientist who made important contributions to operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics.
  Dantzig is known for his development of the simplex algorithm, an algorithm for solving linear programming problems, and his work with linear programming, some years after it was invented by the Soviet mathematician & economist Leonid Kantorovich^{[citation needed]}. In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving late to a lecture of Jerzy Neyman.
  Dantzig was the Professor Emeritus of Transportation Sciences and Professor of Operations Research and of Computer Science at Stanford.
  Born in Portland, Oregon, George Bernard Dantzig was named after George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer.. His father, Tobias Dantzig, was a Baltic German mathematician and linguist, and his mother, Anja Dantzig (née Ourisson), was a French linguist. Dantzig's parents met during their study at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where Tobias studied mathematics under Henri Poincaré. The Dantzigs immigrated to the United States, where they settled in Portland, Oregon.
  
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  George Klir
  George Jiri Klir (born 1932 Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech-American computer scientist and professor of systems sciences at the Center for Intelligent Systems at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.
  George Klir was born in 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he received a M.S. degree in Electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In the early 1960s he taught at the Institute of Computer Research in Prague. In 1964 he received a doctorate in Computer science from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
  In the 1960s Klir went to Iraq to teach at the Baghdad University for two years. At the end he managed to immigrate to the U.S. He started teaching computer science at UCLA and at the Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1969 he came to Binghamton University, where he later became professor of Systems science. One year (1982–1983) he stayed as a fellow in Dutch Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), where he completed the manuscript of his book Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. In 2007 he retired after 37 years at the University. One of his doctoral students was Richard Sternberg.
  
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  Gordon Pask
  Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask (June 28, 1928, Derby – March 29, 1996, London) was an English cybernetician and psychologist who made significant contributions to cybernetics, instructional psychology, experimental epistemology and educational technology.
  Pask was born in Derby, England in 1928. After qualifying precociously as a Mining Engineer at Liverpool Polytechnic, now Liverpool John Moores University, Pask obtained an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1952 and a PhD in Psychology from the University of London in 1964. Whilst Visiting Professor of Educational Technology he obtained the first DSc from the Open University. From the sixties Pask directed commercial research at System Research Ltd in Richmond, Surrey and his partnership, Pask Associate
  Gordon's primary contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, learning theory and systems theory, as well as to numerous other fields, was his emphasis on the personal nature of reality, and on the process of learning as stemming from the consensual agreement of interacting actors in a given environment ("conversation").
  
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  Gregory Bateson
  Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory/cybernetics to the social/behavioral sciences, and spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in various fields of science. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Angels Fear (published posthumously in 1987) was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.
  Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England on 9 May 1904 - the third and youngest son of [Caroline] Beatrice Durham and of the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a BA in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1928. From 1931 to 1937 he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology. During 1936-1950 he was married to Margaret Mead. At that time he applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States.
  
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• Harold Stephen Black
  Harold Stephen Black (April 14, 1898 – December 11, 1983) was an American electrical engineer, who revolutionized the field of applied electronics by inventing the negative feedback amplifier in 1927. To some, his invention is considered the most important breakthrough of the twentieth century in the field of electronics, since it has a wide area of application. This is because all electronic devices (vacuum tubes, bipolar transistors and MOS transistors) invented by mankind are basically nonlinear devices. It is the invention of negative feedback which makes highly linear amplifiers possible. Negative feedback basically works by sacrificing gain for higher linearity (or in other words, smaller distortion or smaller intermodulation). By sacrificing gain, it also has an additional effect of increasing the bandwidth of the amplifier. However, a negative feedback amplifier can be unstable such that it may oscillate. Once the stability problem is solved, the negative feedback amplifier is extremely useful in the field of electronics. Black published a famous paper, Stabilized feedback amplifiers, in 1934.
  
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  Heinz von Foerster
  Heinz von Foerster (born Heinz von Förster; November 13, 1911, Vienna – October 2, 2002, Pescadero, California) was an Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy. Together with Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Lawrence J. Fogel, and others, Heinz von Foerster was an architect of cybernetics.
  Von Foerster was born in 1911 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, as Heinz von Förster. He studied physics at the Technical University of Vienna and at the University of Breslau, where in 1944 he received a Ph.D. in physics.
  He moved to the USA in 1949, and worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a professor of electrical engineering from 1951 to 1975. From 1962 to 1975 he also was professor of biophysics and 1958–75 director of the Biological Computer Laboratory. Additionally, in 1956–57 and 1963–64 he was a Guggenheim-Fellow. From 1963 to 1965 he was president of the Wenner-Gren-Foundation for anthropological research.
  He knew well and was in conversation with John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Lawrence J. Fogel and Margaret Mead, among many others. He influenced generations of students as a teacher and inclusive, enthusiastic collaborator.
  
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• Henri Atlan
  Henri Atlan (born 27 December 1931, Blida) is a French biophysicist and philosopher.
  Born to a Jewish family in French Algeria, Atlan gained degrees in medicine and biophysics at the University of Paris (now University Paris Diderot) . He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley working on aging and mutation. Influenced by Heinz von Foerster, he became interested in applying cybernetics and information theory to living organisms, and went to the Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem to work under the biophysicist Aharon Katchalsky. Returning to Paris in 1972, his publications from that year on information theory and self-organizing systems achieved a wide readership. He taught biophysics at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris and the Hadassah Medical Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His participation with Francisco Varela at a conference in Cerisy-la-Salle encouraged interest in cognitive science in France. Atlan was instrumental in the establishment of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémelogie Appliquée (CREA) at the École Polytechnique, and was appointed in 1983 to the Comité Consultatif National d'Éthique pour la Sciences de a Vie et de la Santé (National Advisory Committee on Ethics in the Life Sciences and Medicine). He has been appointed to a chair in the philosophy of biology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
  
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  Hero of Alexandria
  Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria (Greek: Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς) (c. 10–70 AD) was an ancient Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.
  Hero published a well recognized description of a steam-powered device called an aeolipile (hence sometimes called a "Hero engine"). Among his most famous inventions was a windwheel, constituting the earliest instance of wind harnessing on land. He is said to have been a follower of the Atomists. Some of his ideas were derived from the works of Ctesibius.
  Much of Hero's original writings and designs have been lost, but some of his works were preserved in Arab manuscripts.
  A number of references mention dates around 150 BC, but these are inconsistent with the dates of his publications and inventions. This may be due to a misinterpretation of the phrase "first century" or because Hero was a common name.
  
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  Humberto Maturana
  Humberto Maturana (born September 14, 1928, in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems. His work has been influential in many fields, mainly the field of systems thinking. Overall, his work is concerned with the biology of cognition.
  After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de Salas in 1947, Maturana enrolled at the University of Chile, studying first medicine then biology. In 1954, he obtained a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study anatomy and neurophysiology at University College London. He obtained a PhD in biology from Harvard University in 1958.
  He works in neuroscience at the University of Chile, in the research center "Biología del Conocer" (Biology of Knowledge). Maturana's work has been developed and integrated into the work on Ontological coaching done by Fernando Flores and Julio Olalla.
  
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• Igor Aleksander
  Igor Aleksander FREng (born 1937) is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s.
  Aleksander was educated in Italy and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, arriving in the UK in the late 1950s, intending to become a research student under Colin Cherry. Instead he found work with Standard Telephones and Cables, later joining Queen Mary College where he gained a PhD, subsequently becoming a lecturer there in 1961. He moved to the University of Kent in 1968 as a reader in Electronics and then to Brunel University as a professor in 1974. In 1984 he took up a chair at Imperial College London as professor of the Management of Information Technology. He became Head of Electrical Engineering and was Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1988), and he served as Pro-rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997).
  
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• Ilya Prigogine
  Ilya, Viscount Prigogine (Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin) (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
  Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Moscow Institute of Technology; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian citizenship in 1949.
  Prigogine studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded what is now called The Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
  
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  Jacque Fresco
  Jacque Fresco (born March 13, 1916), is a self-educated structural designer, architectural designer, philosopher of science, concept artist, educator, and futurist. His interests span a wide range of disciplines including several in philosophy, science, architecture and engineering. Fresco writes and lectures extensively on his view of subjects ranging from the holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management, cybernated technology, advanced automation, and the role of science in society, focusing on the benefits he thinks they may bring. With his colleague, Roxanne Meadows, he is the founder and director of an organization known as The Venus Project, located in Venus, Florida. He currently promotes a fundamental change in anthropic organization through the global implementation of a novel socio-economic system predicated on social cooperation, technological automation, and scientific methodology, called a Resource-based economy.
  In contemporary culture he has been popularized by three documentaries, Future By Design,Zeitgeist Addendum, and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, His Venus Project has been inspirational worldwide, especially to activists.
  
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  Jakob von Uexküll
  Jakob Johann von Uexküll (8 September 1864 - 25 July 1944) was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology, animal behaviour studies, and the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok. His works established Biosemiotics as a field of research.
  Jakob von Uexküll was born in the Keblas estate, Mihkli, Governorate of Estonia. According to Giorgio Agamben, Uexküll was a baron before his family lost most of their fortune in World War I, although Uexküll managed to retain a villa on Capri where the critic, historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin stayed for some time. Needing to support himself, Uexküll took a job as professor at the University of Hamburg where he founded the Institut für Umweltforschung.
  Uexküll was interested in how living beings subjectively perceive their environment(s). Uexküll called these subjective spatio-temporal worlds umwelt (German for environment). These umwelten are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "umgebung" which would be objective reality should such a reality exist.
  
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  James Clerk Maxwell
  James Clerk Maxwell of GlenlairFRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottishphysicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This unites all previously unrelated observations, experiments, and equations of electricity, magnetism, and optics into a consistent theory.Maxwell's equations demonstrate that electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. Subsequently, all other classic laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's achievements concerning electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.
  Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves and at the constant speed of light. In 1865, Maxwell published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. It was with this that he first proposed that light was in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. His work in producing a unified model of electromagnetism is one of the greatest advances in physics.
  
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• James Grier Miller
  James Grier Miller (1916 – 7 November 2002, California) was an American biologist, a pioneer of systems science, who originated the modern use of the term "behavioral science", founded and directed the multi-disciplinary Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, and originated the living systems theory.
  Miller received his A.B. summa cum laude in 1937, an A.M. in psychology in 1938, an M.D. cum laude in 1942, and Ph.D. in psychology in 1943 all from Harvard University, where he was also a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows. Following military service in World War II, he served as Chief of the newly formed Clinical Psychology section of the Veteran's Administration central office in Washington.
  He has served on the faculty at Harvard. In 1948, he accepted the position of Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, which he held until 1955. From 1955 to 1967 he directed the multi-disciplinary Mental Health Research Institute At Michigan. In 1967 to pursue an administrative career, first as provost of the newly founded Cleveland State University, and then in 1973 as president of the University of Louisville, from which position he retired in 1980.
  
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• Jay Wright Forrester
  Jay Wright Forrester (born July 14, 1918-) is a pioneer American computer engineer, systems scientist and was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems.
  Forrester was born in 1918 on a cattle ranch near Anselmo, Nebraska. His early interest in electricity was possibly sparked by the fact that the ranch had none. While in high school, he built a wind-driven 12-volt electrical system using old car parts—it gave the ranch its first electric power. After finishing high school, he had received a scholarship to go to the Agricultural College. Three weeks before enrolling, he realized a future of herding cattle in Nebraska winter blizzards had never appealed to him. So in 1936 he enrolled in the Engineering College at the University of Nebraska to study electrical engineering. As it turns out this study was about the only academic field with a solid, central core of theoretical dynamics.
  
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  John von Neumann
  John von Neumann ( /vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics, linear programming, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians", while Peter Lax described him as possessing the most "fearsome technical prowess" and "scintillating intellect" of the century, and Hans Bethe stated "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man". Even in Budapest, in the time that produced geniuses like Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881), George de Hevesy (b. 1885), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898), Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), Edward Teller (b. 1908), and Paul Erdős (b. 1913), his brilliance stood out.
  
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  Julian Bigelow
  Julian Bigelow (1913–2003) was a pioneering American computer engineer.
  Bigelow was born in 1913 and obtained a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering and mathematics. During World War II, he assisted Norbert Wiener's research on automated fire control for anti-aircraft guns. Bigelow coauthored (with Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth) one of the founding papers on cybernetics and modern teleology, titled "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology." This paper mulled over the way mechanical, biological, and electronic systems could communicate and interact. This paper instigated the formation of the Teleological Society and later the Macy conferences. Bigelow was an active member of both organizations.
  When John von Neumann sought to build one of the very first digital computers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he hired Bigelow in 1946 as his "engineer," on Wiener's recommendation. Dyson (1997) argues that the computer Bigelow built following von Neumann's design, called the IAS machine, and not the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania or the Colossus computer designed as part of the code-cracking project at Bletchley Park in England, was the first true stored-program computer. Because von Neumann did not patent the IAS and wrote about it freely, 15 clones of the IAS were soon built. Nearly all general-purpose computers subsequently built are recognizable as influenced by the IAS machine's design.
  
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  Kevin Warwick
  Kevin Warwick (born 9 February 1954 Coventry, UK) is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research in the field of robotics.
  Kevin Warwick was born in 1954 in Coventry in the United Kingdom. He attended Lawrence Sheriff School in Rugby, Warwickshire. He left school in 1970 to join British Telecom, at the age of 16. In 1976 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D and a research post at Imperial College London.
  He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle and Warwick universities before being offered the Chair in Cybernetics at the University of Reading in 1987.
  Warwick is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He is Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the University of Strathclyde and in 2004 was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also Director of the University of Reading Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Centre, which links the University with Companies and is on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University and the Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter.
  
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• Louis Couffignal
  Louis Couffignal (1902-1966) was a French Mathematician and Cybernetics pioneer. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School.
  After joining the school, Couffignal hesitated to write a thesis on Symbolic Logic but after his meetings with Maurice d'Ocagne, he decided to focus on machines and on Mechanical Logic.
  He published a variety of notes at the Academy of Sciences, with a focus on using binary computation by machines to solve new problems. Following Leibniz, he promoted binary numbers as the basis of calculating machines. Couffignal received his Doctorate of Sciences in 1938 with his thesis on Mechanical Analysis, demonstrating applications for machines to calculate celestial mechanics. Couffignal took on an interest in Cybernetics, influenced by his meetings with Louis Lapicque in 1941 and the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener in 1946.
  With Lapicque, Couffignal compared the functioning of the nervous system and that of machines, as Wiener prepared his book Cybernetics, the book that established the foundations for the subject.
  
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  Louis Kauffman
  Louis H. Kauffman (3 February, 1945) is an American mathematician, topologist, and professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is known for the introduction and development of the bracket polynomial and Kauffman polynomial.
  Kauffman was valedictorian of his graduating class at Norwood Norfolk Central High School in 1962. He received his B.S. at MIT in 1966 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1972.
  Kauffman has worked at many places as a visiting professor and researcher, including the University of Zaragoza in Spain, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the Institute Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures Sur Yevette, France, the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris, France, the Università di Bologna, Italy, the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brasil, and the Newton Institute in Cambridge England.
  He is the founding editor and one of the managing editors of the Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, and editor of the World Scientific Book Series On Knots and Everything. He writes a column entitled Virtual Logic for the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing
  
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  Margaret Mead
  Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
  She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.
  An Anglican Christian, she played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
  Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but raised in Doylestown. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. This was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named this baby, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently, so her early education alternated between home-schooling and traditional schools. Born into a family of varying religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been formally acquainted with, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Margaret studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1923.
  
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• Murray Bowen
  Murray Bowen, M.D., (31 January 1913, Waverly, Tennessee - 9 October 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a professor in psychiatry at the Georgetown University. Bowen was among the pioneers of family therapy and founders of systemic therapy. Beginning in the 1950s, he developed a systems theory of the family.
  Murray Bowen was born in 1913 as the oldest of five and grew up in the small town of Waverly, Tennessee, where his father was the mayor for some time. Bowen got his B.S. in 1934 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He received his MD in 1937 at the Medical School of the University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis. After that, he had internships at the Bellevue Hospital in New York City in 1938 and at the Grasslands Hospital, Valhalla, New York, from 1939 to 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he had his military training followed by five years of active duty with Army in the United States and Europe. During the war, his interest changed from surgery to psychiatry. While observing the soldiers he decided that mental illness was a more pressing and worthwhile goal. After his military service he had been accepted for fellowship in surgery at Mayo Clinic. But in 1946, he started at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, as fellow in psychiatry and personal psychoanalysis. This psychiatric training and experience lasted here until 1954.
  
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• Nicolas Schöffer
  Nicolas Schöffer (Hungarian: Schöffer Miklós; September 6, 1912 — January 8, 1992) was a Hungarian-born French artist. He can be considered as the father of cybernetic art. He was born in Kalocsa, Austria-Hungary and resided in Paris from 1936 till his death in his Montmartre atelier in 1992. His career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and music. Indeed he collaborated on music with Pierre Henry. All of the artistic actions of Schöffer were done in the pursuit of a dynamism in art.
  This interest in artistic dynamism was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified by the Russian Constructivism artists, such as Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. All these artists were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension of time and motion. And this was the intention of Schöffer as well.
  Schöffer however, coming well after, benefited from cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems (interactivity) primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964)) in that they suggested to him artistic processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g., the circular causality of feedback-loops). For Schöffer, this enabled cybernetics to elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.
  
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  Niklas Luhmann
  Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 - November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.
  Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, where his father's family had been running a brewery for several generations. After graduating from the Johanneum school in 1943, he was conscripted as a Luftwaffenhelfer in World War II and served for two years until, at the age of 17, he was taken prisoner of war by American troops in 1945. After the war Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, and then began a career in Lüneburg's public administration. During a sabbatical in 1961, he went to Harvard, where he met and studied under Talcott Parsons, then the world's most influential social systems theorist.
  In later years, Luhmann dismissed Parsons' theory, developing a rival approach of his own. Leaving the civil service in 1962, he lectured at the national Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften (University for Administrative Sciences) in Speyer, Germany, until 1965, when he was offered a position at the Sozialforschungsstelle (Social Research Centre) of the University of Münster, led by Helmut Schelsky. 1965/66 he studied one semester of sociology at the University of Münster.
  
  wn.com/Niklas_Luhmann
• 
  Norbert Wiener
  Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894, Columbia, Missouri – March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) was an American mathematician. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT.
  A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
  Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with many implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.
  Wiener was the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jews of Polish and German descent, respectively. Norbert Wiener became a famous child prodigy. Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics, and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.
  
  wn.com/Norbert_Wiener
• 
  Plato
  Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
  Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
  
  wn.com/Plato
• Pyotr Anokhin
  Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin (Пётр Кузьми́ч Ано́хин) (1898 – 1974) was a Russian biologist and physiologist, author of Theory of functional systems and concept of systemogenesis . He made important contributions to cybernetics and psychophysiology. His pioneering concept on feedback was published in 1935 .
  Anokhin was born in Russia in 1898. He studied neurophysiology and received a doctorate of medicine. He was an academician of Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and the Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was one of the founders of the Institute of psychology of the USSR and the laboratory of neuro-physiology of training.
  In the 1920s he started his academic career under the guidance of Ivan Pavlov, Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. He developed the concept of feedback, published in 1935. Furthermore he "elaborated the theory of functional systems (FS) which tied together subtle neuro-physiological mechanisms and integral activity of an individual. FS theory was considered as the “methodological bridge” between psychology and physiology".
  
  wn.com/Pyotr_Anokhin
• 
  Qian Xuesen
  Qian Xuesen (simplified Chinese: 钱学森; traditional Chinese: 錢學森; pinyin: Qián Xuésēn; Wade–Giles: Ch'ien Hsüeh-sên) (11 December 1911 – 31 October 2009) was a scientist who made important contributions to the missile and space programs of both the United States and People's Republic of China. Historical documents in the U. S. commonly refer to him with the earlier family-name last spelling, Hsue-Shen Tsien or H.S. Tsien.
  During the 1940s Qian was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. During the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, the United States government accused Qian of having communist sympathies, and he was stripped of his security clearance in 1950. Qian then decided to return to China, but instead was detained at Terminal Island near Los Angeles. After spending 5 years under virtual house arrest, Qian was released in 1955, in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots captured during the Korean War. Notified by U.S. authorities that he was free to go, Qian immediately arranged his departure, leaving for China in September 1955, on the passenger liner SS President Cleveland of American President Lines, via Hong Kong. He returned to lead the Chinese rocket program, and became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" (or "King of Rocketry").
  
  wn.com/Qian_Xuesen
• Robert Trappl
  Robert Trappl (16 January 1939, Vienna) is an Austrian scientist, and Professor at the Center for Brain Research, Medical University of Vienna, Austria, known for his work in the field of cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence.
  In the 1960s in Vienna Trappl received a degree in electrical engineering, a degree in sociology from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, and PhD in psychology, with a minor in astronomy.
  Since the 1970s he has been working at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Since the 1980s he is the director of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), and later on also the head of the Institute of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Beside his work at the University he has advized several national and international companies and organizations.
  In the 1970s he was President of the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies, Austria. In this position in 1980 he co-founded the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) of which he became vice-president and from 1986 to 1988 president.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Trappl
• Roy Ascott
  Roy Ascott is a British artist and theorist, who works with cybernetics and telematics. He is President of the Planetary Collegium.
  Roy Ascott was born in Bath, England. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School. His National Service was spent as an officer in the Royal Air Force working with radar defence systems). From 1955-59 he studied Fine Art at King's College, University of Durham (now Newcastle University) under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, and Art History under Lawrence Gowing and Quentin Bell. On graduation he was appointed Studio Demonstrator (1959–61). He then moved to London, where he established the radical Groundcourse at Ealing Art College, which he subsequently established at Ipswich Civic College, in Suffolk. Notable alumni of the Groundcourse include Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, Stephen Willats, and Michael English.
  He taught in London Ealing, and was a visiting lecturer at other London art schools throughout the 1960s. Then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, before moving to California as Vice-President and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, during the 1970s. He was Professor for Communications Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s.[7]
  
  wn.com/Roy_Ascott
• 
  Stuart Kauffman
  Stuart Alan Kauffman (September 28, 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. In 1971 Kauffman proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction. Reproducing peptide, DNA, and RNA collectively autocatalytic sets have now been made experimentally. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits. His hypotheses stating that cell types are attractors of such networks, and that genetic regulatory networks are "critical" have found experimental support.
  Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987–1992.
  
  wn.com/Stuart_Kauffman
• 
  Stuart Umpleby
  Stuart Anspach Umpleby (born March 5, 1944) is an American cybernetician and a professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at the George Washington University.
  Umpleby attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received degrees in engineering in 1967, in political science in 1967 and in 1969, and a PhD in communications in 1975.
  In the 1960s, while a student at the University of Illinois, Umpleby worked in the Institute of Communications Research, The Biological Computer Laboratory and the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (the PLATO system). From 1967 to 1975 he and other students developed computer conferencing systems and other applications for time shared computers.
  After moving to George Washington University, he was the moderator from 1977 to 1980, of a computer conference on general systems theory supported by the National Science Foundation. Between 1982 and 1988 he arranged scientific meetings involving American and Soviet scientists in the area of cybernetics and general systems theory.
  
  wn.com/Stuart_Umpleby
• 
  Su Song
  Su Song (simplified Chinese: 苏颂; traditional Chinese: 蘇頌; pinyin: Sū Sòng; style name: Zirong 子容) (1020–1101 AD) was a renowned Chinese polymath who specialized himself as a statesman, astronomer, cartographer, horologist, pharmacologist, mineralogist, zoologist, botanist, mechanical and architectural engineer, poet, antiquarian, and ambassador of the Song Dynasty (960–1279).
  Su Song was the engineer of a water-driven astronomical clock tower in medieval Kaifeng, which employed the use of an early escapement mechanism. The escapement mechanism of Su's clock tower had previously been invented by Buddhist monk Yi Xing and government official Liang Lingzan in 725 AD to operate a water-powered armillary sphere, although Su's armillary sphere was the first to be provided with a mechanical clock drive. Su's clock tower also featured the oldest known endless power-transmitting chain drive, called the tian ti (天梯), or "celestial ladder", as depicted in his horological treatise. The clock tower had 133 different clock jacks to indicate and sound the hours. Su Song's treatise about the clock tower, Xinyi Xiangfayao (新 儀 . 象 法 要), has survived since its written form in 1092 and official printed publication in 1094. The book has been analyzed by many historians, such as Joseph Needham. However, the clock itself was dismantled by the invading Jurchen army in AD 1127, and although attempts were made to reassemble the clock tower, it was never successfully reinstated. Although the Xinyi Xiangfayao was his best known treatise, the polymath had other works compiled as well. He completed a large celestial atlas of several star maps, several terrestrial maps, as well as a treatise on pharmacology. The latter discussed related subjects on mineralogy, zoology, botany, and metallurgy.
  
  wn.com/Su_Song
• Szolem Mandelbrojt
  Szolem Mandelbrojt (10 January 1899 – 23 September 1983) was a Jewish-Polish mathematician. He worked mainly in classical analysis; he was a student of Jacques Hadamard, and became Hadamard's successor as Professor at the Collège de France.
  He was an early member of the Bourbaki group, taking part in some of its initial gatherings. In fact his direction was very different, as his publications show, with an interest in Dirichlet series, lacunary series, entire functions and other major topics in complex analysis and harmonic analysis. He is more accurately described as a follower of G. H. Hardy, and can be placed in the group containing Norbert Wiener and Torsten Carleman who were moderate modernisers of classical Fourier analysis. Shmuel Agmon, Jean-Pierre Kahane, Yitzhak Katznelson, and Paul Malliavin are among his students.
  During World War II he was in the United States, in Houston at the Rice Institute from 1940, being one of many French scientists helped by the programme of Louis Rapkine (1904–1948).
  
  wn.com/Szolem_Mandelbrojt
• 
  Talcott Parsons
  Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973.
  Parsons developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism and the epistemological principle of analytical realism. The theory attempted to establish a balance between two major methodological traditions: the utilitarian-positivist and hermeneutic-idealistic traditions. For Parsons, voluntarism established a third alternative between these two. More than a theory of society, Parsons presented a theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the "drives" and directions of world history.
  Parsons analyzed the work of Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto and evaluated their contributions through the paradigm of voluntaristic action. Parsons was also largely responsible for introducing and interpreting Max Weber's work to American audiences. Although he was generally considered a major structuralist functionalist scholar, in an article late in life, Parsons explicitly wrote that the term "functional" or "structural functionalist" were inappropriate ways to describe the character of his theory. For Parsons, "structural functionalism" was a particular stage in the methodological development of the social science, and "functionalism" was a universal method; neither term was a name for any specific school. In the same way, the concept "grand theory" is a derogatory term, which Parsons himself never used.
  
  wn.com/Talcott_Parsons
• Valentin Turchin
  Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (Russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 1931 – 7 April 2010) was a Soviet and American cybernetician and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation. As such he can be seen as a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and one of the visionaries at the basis of the Global brain idea.
  Turchin was born in 1931 in Podolsk, Soviet Union. In 1952, he graduated from Moscow University in Theoretical Physics, and got his Ph.D. in 1957. After working on neutron and solid-state physics at the Institute for Physics of Energy in Obninsk, in 1964 he accepted a position at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow. There he worked in statistical regularization methods and authored REFAL, one of the first AI languages and the AI language of choice in the Soviet Union.
  In the 1960s, Turchin became politically active. In 1968 he authored "The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview", a scathing critique of totalitarianism supported by an emerging cybernetic social theory. Following its publication in the underground press, he lost his research laboratory. In 1970 he authored "The Phenomenon of Science", a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book. By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International with Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. In 1974 he lost his position at the Institute, and was persecuted by the KGB. Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1977.
  
  wn.com/Valentin_Turchin
• 
  Walter Pitts
  Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. (23 April 1923 – 14 May 1969) was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology.
  He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, together with what has come to be known as the generative sciences. He is best remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, a seminal paper entitled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943). This paper proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network. The unit of this model, a simple formalized neuron, is still the standard of reference in the field of neural networks. It is often called a McCulloch–Pitts neuron.
  Walter Pitts was born in Detroit. Michigan on April 23, 1923, the son of Walter and Marie (née Welsia). He was an autodidact who taught himself logic and mathematics and was able to read a number of languages including Greek and Latin. At the age of 12 he spent three days in a library reading Principia Mathematica and sent a letter to Bertrand Russell pointing out what he considered serious problems with the first half of the first volume. Russell was appreciative and invited him to study in the United Kingdom. Although this offer was not taken up, Pitts decided to become a logician.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Pitts
• William Grey Walter
  W. Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist and robotician.
  Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910. His ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to England in 1915, and educated at Westminster School and afterwards in King's College, Cambridge, in 1931. He failed to obtain a research fellowship in Cambridge and so turned to doing basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals, in London, from 1935 to 1939 and then at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, from 1939 to 1970. He also carried out research work in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He married twice, and had two sons from his first marriage and one from the second. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, "he was politically on the left, a communist fellow-traveller before the Second World War and an anarchist sympathiser after it." Throughout his life he was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. In 1970 he suffered brain injury in a motor scooter accident. He died seven years later on May 6, 1977 without fully recovering.
  
  wn.com/William_Grey_Walter
• 
  William Ross Ashby
  W. Ross Ashby (London, 6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
  His two books, Design for a brain and An introduction to cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking to the nascent discipline, and were highly influential.
  William Ross Ashby was born in 1903 in London, where his father was working at an advertising agency. From 1917 to 1921 William studied at the Edinburgh Academy in Scotland, and from 1921 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he received his B.A. in 1924 and his M.B. and B.Ch. in 1928. From 1924 to 1928 he worked at the St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Later on he also received a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1931, and an M.A. 1930 and M.D. from Cambridge in 1935.
  Ross Ashby started working in 1930 as a Clinical Psychiatrist in the London County Council. From 1936 until 1947 he was a Research Pathologist in the St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton in England. From 1945 to 1947 he served in India where he was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
  
  wn.com/William_Ross_Ashby

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