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Jay Wright Forrester
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Jay Wright Forrester (born July 14, 1918, Climax, Nebraska) 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.
ester was born in 1918 on a cattle ranch near Anselmo, Nebraska, in the middle of the United States. His early interest in electricity was spurred, perhaps, by the fact that the ranch had none.
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Jay Wright Forrester (born July 14, 1918, Climax, Nebraska) 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.
Biography
Forrester was born in 1918 on a cattle ranch near Anselmo, Nebraska, in the middle of the United States. His early interest in electricity was spurred, perhaps, 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 instead 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..
After finishing the University in 1939 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to become a research assistant and eventually spend his entire career. In his first year at MIT he was commandeered by Gordon S. Brown who was the pioneer in "feedback control systems" at MIT. During World War II his work with Gordon Brown was in developing servomechanisms for the control of radar antennas and gun mounts. This work was research toward an extremely practical end that ran from mathematical theory to the operating field. Experimental units were installed on the USS Lexington, and, when they stopped working, he volunteered to go to Pearl Harbor in 1942. He fixed the problem when the ship sailed off-shore during the invasion of Tarawa.
At the end of the war at MIT Forrester in 1944 started a project building of an aircraft flight simulator. The aircraft simulator was planned as an analog computer, but became the Whirlwind digital computer for experimental development of military combat information systems. This eventually became the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system for North America. Around 1949, the Navy was losing interest in Whirlwind and considered scrapping it. But that August, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. Relations between the U.S. and its former ally had so deteriorated that this event inspired worry and alarm throughout the government. People in the military realized that computers would be essential in the defense of the country now that the USSR had the capacity to attack from afar. Whirlwind, as the Navy's most advanced computer, suddenly looked good again. Forrester continued his research in electrical and computer engineering until 1956. By then he felt the pioneering days in digital computers were over and he left engineering to go into management.
In 1956, Forrester moved to the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is currently Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer. But applying his engineering view of electrical systems to the field of human systems would break new ground. Forrester focused on concrete experimental studies of organizational policy. He used computer simulations to analyze social systems and predict the implications of different models. This method came to be called "system dynamics," and Forrester came to be recognized as its creator.
In 1982, he received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award. In 1989, he received the National Medal of Technology. In 2006, he was inducted into the Operational Research Hall of Fame.
Work
Forrester is the founder of System Dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems. He has made numerous contributions to the further development and application of System Dynamics, and has promoted System Dynamics in education down to the present day.
The Whirlwind project
The Whirlwind computer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the first computer that operated in real time, used video displays for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. Its development led directly to the United States Air Force's Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, Forrester did research in electrical and computer engineering, heading the Whirlwind project and developing the "Multi-coordinate digitally information storage device" (coincident-current system), the forerunner of today's RAM. He is believed to have created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a "jumping ball" on an oscilloscope.
Magnetic core memory
As part of the WHIRLWIND I project, Forrester invented and patented coincident-current random-access magnetic computer memory. This became the industry standard for computer memory for approximately twenty years. The WHIRLWIND I project also motivated Forrester to create the technology that first facilitated the practical digital control of machine tools.
Industrial dynamics
Industrial dynamics nowadays is the study of: innovation, as an economic phenomenon that transforms industries in an endogenous manner. It is at the core of industrial dynamics approaches and at the same time is one of the key challenges for a growing part of the scientific community.
- The economic analysis capture and measure regularities of the complex processes of industry evolution.
- The modelling of industrial dynamics, supported by empirical evidence, allows for the existence of heterogeneity in the characteristics of firms within an industry in terms of size, entry/exit, performance, innovation strategies, etc.
- The industrial dynamics approaches are uncovering new evidence about how firms compete and how competition should operate. That is in sharp contrast with the results of more basic industrial organization studies.
Originally, industrial dynamics encompassed the study of the different variables characterizing industries (such as entry/exit, penetration-rate, innovation rate, R&D expenses, number of patents), and their comparison from one period to another. Though these initial developments included important elements related to the quantitative functioning of industries, it is nowadays largely accepted that the early contributions often neglected the genuine determinants of the evolution of innovative industries.
Industrial Dynamics (1961) was the first book Forrester wrote using System Dynamics to analyze industrial business cycles.
Urban dynamics
Several years later, interactions with former Boston Mayor John F. Collins led Forrester to write Urban Dynamics (1969), which sparked an ongoing debate on the feasibility of modeling broader social problems.
System dynamics
System dynamics combines the theory, methods, and philosophy needed to analyze the behavior of systems in not only management, but also in environmental change, politics, economic behavior, medicine, engineering, and other fields. System dynamics provides a common foundation that can be applied wherever we want to understand and influence how things change through time.
The system dynamics process starts from a problem to be solved: a situation that needs to be better understood, or an undesirable behavior that is to be corrected or avoided. It uses concepts drawn from the field of feedback control to organize available information into computer simulation models. A digital computer as a simulator, acting out the roles of the operating people in the real system, reveals the behavioral implications of the system that has been described in the model. The first articles based on this work appeared in the Harvard Business Review (Forrester, 1958).
World dynamics
The urban dynamics model attracted the attention of urban planners around the world, eventually leading Forrester to meet a founder of the Club of Rome. He later met with the Club of Rome to discuss issues surrounding global sustainability; the book World Dynamics followed. World Dynamics took on modeling the complex interactions of the world economy, population and ecology, which understandably met with much misunderstanding (see also Donella Meadows and Limits to Growth).
See also
Publications
Forrester has written several books, articles and papers. Books, a selection:
- 1961. Industrial dynamics. Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.
- 1968. Principles of Systems, 2nd ed. Pegasus Communications.
- 1969. Urban Dynamics. Pegasus Communications.
- 1971. World Dynamics. Wright-Allen Press.
- 1975. Collected Papers of Jay W. Forrester. Pegasus Communications.
Articles and papers, a selection:
- 1958. "Industrial Dynamics--A Major Breakthrough for Decision Makers.", in: Harvard Business Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 37-66.
- 1968, .
- 1971, .
- 1989, .
- 1991, .
- 1992, .
- 1994, .
- 1996, .
- 1998, .
- 1999, .
External links
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