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

• Adaptive filter
• Alan V. Oppenheim
• Analog delay line
• Applied mathematics
• Array processing
• Calculus
• Circular buffer
• Compandor
• Computer
• Computer vision
• Control system
• Correlation
• Data compression
• Data mining
• Delay line
• Denoising
• Detection theory
• Digital delay line
• Digitization
• Echo-cancellation
• Electric current
• Electrocardiogram
• Electromagnetic wave
• Electronic filter
• Electronic mixer
• Equalization
• Equalization filter
• Estimation theory
• Feature extraction
• Floating-point
• Frequency mixer
• Functional analysis
• Image compression
• Image enhancement
• Image processing
• Integrator
• Iterative methods
• Kalman filter
• Linear algebra
• Look-up table
• Modem
• Modulation
• Multiplexer
• Multiplexing
• Numerical analysis
• OFDM
• OSI model
• Passive filter
• Pattern recognition
• Phase-locked loop
• Physical Layer
• Prediction
• Prentice Hall
• Presentation Layer
• Probability
• Quantization error
• Reverb
• Ronald W. Schafer
• Sample and hold
• Sensor
• Signal (electronics)
• Signal processing
• Signal subspace
• Signalling theory
• Smoothing
• Source coding
• Spectrum analyzer
• Speech recognition
• Spread spectrum
• Stochastic processes
• Synthesizer
• Systems engineering
• Transducer
• Transform theory
• Vector spaces
• Video processing
• Voltage
• Waveform
• Wavetable synthesis
• Wiener filter
• 
  

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  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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  Soviet Union
  The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
  The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
  The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
  
  wn.com/Soviet_Union

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  Alan Turing
  Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( /ˈtjʊərɪŋ/ TEWR-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
  During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
  After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Turing
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  Andrey Kolmogorov
  Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров) (25 April 1903 – 20 October 1987) was a Soviet mathematician, preeminent in the 20th century, who advanced various scientific fields, among them probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics and computational complexity.
  Kolmogorov was born at Tambov in 1903. His unwed mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his aunts in Tunoshna near Yaroslavl at the estate of his grandfather, a wealthy nobleman. His father, an agronomist by trade, was deported from Saint-Petersburg for participation in the revolutionary movement. He disappeared and was presumed to have been killed in the Russian Civil War.
  Kolmogorov was educated in his aunt's village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school newspaper. As an adolescent he designed perpetual motion machines, concealing their (necessary) defects so cleverly that his secondary-school teachers could not discover them. In 1910, his aunt adopted him and then they moved to Moscow, where he went to a gymnasium, graduating from it in 1920.
  
  wn.com/Andrey_Kolmogorov
• 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
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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
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  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
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  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
• 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
• Fazlollah Reza
  Fazlollah M. Reza (born January 1, 1915) is an Iranian university professor. He was born in Rasht, Iran.
  Reza graduated from Faculty of Engineering, University of Tehran in 1938 by receiving his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He received his master's and PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1946 and Polytechnic University of New York in 1950 respectively. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS for major contribution to network and information theory.
  Reza has served as the head of Sharif University of Technology, University of Tehran, Iran's ambassador to Canada and Iran's ambassador to UNESCO. As a professor, he has taught at MIT, McGill University, and University of Tehran.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Fazlollah_Reza
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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.
  
  wn.com/Francisco_Varela
• 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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  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").
  
  wn.com/Gordon_Pask
• Harry Nyquist
  Harry Nyquist (né Harry Theodor Nyqvist; /ˈnaɪkwɪst/, Swedish: [nʏːkvɪst]; February 7, 1889 – April 4, 1976) was an important contributor to information theory.
  Nyquist was born in the Stora Kil parish of Nilsby, Värmland, Sweden. He was the son of Lars Jonsson Nyqvist (b. 1847) and Katrina Eriksdotter (b. 1857). His parents had seven children: Elin Teresia, Astrid, Selma, Harry Theodor, Aemelie, Olga Maria, and Axel. He emigrated to the USA in 1907.
  He entered the University of North Dakota in 1912 and received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering in 1914 and 1915, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in physics at Yale University in 1917.
  He worked at AT&T's Department of Development and Research from 1917 to 1934, and continued when it became Bell Telephone Laboratories in that year, until his retirement in 1954.
  Nyquist received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1960 for "fundamental contributions to a quantitative understanding of thermal noise, data transmission and negative feedback." In October 1960 he was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute "for his theoretical analyses and practical inventions in the field of communications systems during the past forty years including, particularly, his original work in the theories of telegraph transmission, thermal noise in electric conductors, and in the history of feedback systems." In 1969 he was awarded the National Academy of Engineering's fourth Founder's Medal "in recognition of his many fundamental contributions to engineering."
  
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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.
  
  wn.com/Heinz_von_Foerster
• Hubert Yockey
  Professor Hubert P. Yockey (b. April 15, 1916), PhD is a physicist and information theorist. He worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, and at the University of California, Berkeley.
  He has studied the application of information theory to problems in biology and published his conclusions in the Journal of Theoretical Biology from 1974 onwards. He is very critical of the primordial soup theory of the origin of life, and believes that "the origin of life is unsolvable as a scientific problem".
  Well into his sixties, Yockey organized and lead canoe expeditions in the wilderness of Nunavik, Quebec, Canada. The details can be found at Hubert P. Yockey's personal website.
  
  
  
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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.
  
  wn.com/Humberto_Maturana
• 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).
  
  wn.com/Igor_Aleksander
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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.
  
  wn.com/Jacque_Fresco
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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.
  
  wn.com/Jakob_von_Uexküll
• James Gleick
  James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist and biographer whose best-selling books include The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and Chaos: Making a New Science. Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists. They have been translated into more than twenty languages.
  Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard University, graduating in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
  After the publication of Chaos, Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series.
  
  wn.com/James_Gleick
• 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.
  
  wn.com/Jay_Wright_Forrester
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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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  Ludwig Boltzmann
  Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory at a time when that scientific model was still highly controversial.
  Boltzmann was born in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. His father, Ludwig Georg Boltzmann, was a tax official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann’s mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg. He received his primary education from a private tutor at the home of his parents. Boltzmann attended high school in Linz, Upper Austria. At age 15, Boltzmann lost his father.
  Boltzmann studied physics at the University of Vienna, starting in 1863. Among his teachers were Josef Loschmidt, Joseph Stefan, Andreas von Ettingshausen and Jozef Petzval. Boltzmann received his PhD degree in 1866 working under the supervision of Stefan; his dissertation was on kinetic theory of gases. In 1867 he became a Privatdozent (lecturer). After obtaining his doctorate degree, Boltzmann worked two more years as Stefan’s assistant. It was Stefan who introduced Boltzmann to Maxwell's work.
  
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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
• 
  Ralph Hartley
  Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley (November 30, 1888 – May 1, 1970) was an electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory.
  Hartley was born in Spruce, Nevada, USA and attended the University of Utah, receiving an A.B. degree in 1909. He became a Rhodes Scholar at St Johns, Oxford University, in 1910 and received a B.A. degree in 1912 and a B.Sc. degree in 1913. He married Florence Vail of Brooklyn on March 21, 1916. The Hartleys had no children.
  He returned to the United States and was employed at the Research Laboratory of the Western Electric Company. In 1915 he was in charge of radio receiver development for the Bell System transatlantic radiotelephone tests. For this he developed the Hartley oscillator and also a neutralizing circuit to eliminate triode singing resulting from internal coupling. A patent for the oscillator was filed on June 1, 1915 and awarded on October 26, 1920.
  During World War I he established the principles that led to sound-type directional finders.
  
  wn.com/Ralph_Hartley
• 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
• Rolf Landauer
  Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 28, 1999) was an IBM physicist who in 1961 argued that when information is lost in an irreversible circuit, the information becomes entropy and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing.
  Landauer was born on February 4, 1927, in Stuttgart, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews, graduated in 1943 from Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City's mathematics and science magnet schools, and obtained his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1945. Following service in the US Navy as an Electrician's Mate, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950.
  He first worked for two years at NASA, then known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and at the age of 25 began a career in semiconductors at IBM. As part of the two-man team responsible for managing IBM's Research Division in the mid-1960s, he was involved in a number of programs, including the company's work on semiconductor lasers. In 1969, he was appointed an IBM Fellow.
  
  wn.com/Rolf_Landauer
• 
  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
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  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
• 
  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 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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