General Systems Theory

Both the philosophers of antiquity and modern scientists have noticed that there are striking similarities between a wide variety of complex systems - whether they are biological organisms, human languages or economic life. In the 20th century, scientists such as the biologists Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), Humberto Maturana (1928-2021) and Francisco Varela (1946-2001), the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the computer scientist Jay Wright Forrester (1918-2016) and physicists such as Erich Jantzsch (1919-1980), Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) and Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) set out to create universally valid theories to describe complex systems. These ideas became known under names such as "general systems theory", "cybernetics", and "chaos theory".