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| The Universe
represented as multiple disk-shaped slices
across time, which passes from left to right. |
Systems Science
Systems science is an interdisciplinary field that
studies the nature of systems—from simple to complex—in
nature, society, cognition, engineering, technology and
science itself. To systems scientists, the world can be
understood as a system of systems. The field aims to
develop interdisciplinary foundations that are
applicable in a variety of areas, such as psychology,
biology, medicine, communication, business management,
technology, computer science, engineering, and social
sciences. |
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Systems scientists
General systems scientists can be divided into different
generations. The founders of the systems movement like
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard,
James Grier Miller, George J. Klir, and Anatol Rapoport
were all born between 1900 and 1920. They came from
different natural and social science disciplines and
joined forces in the 1950s to establish the general
systems theory paradigm. Along with the organization of
their efforts a first generation of systems scientists
rose.
Among them were other scientists like Ackoff, Ashby,
Margaret Mead and Churchman, who popularized the systems
concept in the 1950s and 1960s. These scientists
inspired and educated a second generation with more
notable scientists like Ervin Laszlo (1932) and Fritjof
Capra (1939), who wrote about systems theory in the
1970s and 1980s. Others got acquainted and started
studying these works in the 1980s and started writing
about it since the 1990s. Debora Hammond can be seen as
a typical representative of these third generation of
general systems scientists. |
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Organizations
The International Society for the Systems Sciences
(ISSS) is an organisation for interdisciplinary
collaboration and synthesis of systems sciences. The
ISSS is unique among systems-oriented institutions in
terms of the breadth of its scope, bringing together
scholars and practitioners from academic, business,
government, and non-profit organizations. Based on fifty
years of tremendous interdisciplinary research from the
scientific study of complex systems to interactive
approaches in management and community development. This
society was initially conceived in 1954 at the Stanford
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences by
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard,
and Anatol Rapoport.
In the field of systems science the International
Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) is an
international federation for global and local societies
in the field of systems science. This federation is a
non-profit, scientific and educational agency founded in
1981, and constituted of some thirty member
organizations from various countries. The overall
purpose of this Federation is to advance cybernetic and
systems research and systems applications and to serve
the international systems community.
The best known research institute in the field is the
Santa Fe Institute (SFI) located in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, United States, dedicated to the study of complex
systems. This institute was founded in 1984 by George
Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann,
Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and
Richard Slansky. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were
scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory. SFI's
original mission was to disseminate the notion of a
separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity
theory referred to at SFI as complexity science.
Recently, IIT Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India started
inculcating system science and engineering to its
students through Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate
programs. This makes it the first institution to offer
system science education to students in India. |
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