Systems Science - Systems Scientists

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 all came from different natural and social science disciplines and joined forces in the 1950s to established 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 and Churchman, who popularized the systems concept in the 1950s and 1960s. These scientists inspired and educated a second generation with more notable scientist 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.