The systems science portal
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| Complex systems approach |
Systems science is an transdisciplinary[1] 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, engineering, and social sciences.
Systems science covers formal sciences such as complex systems, cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, information theory, linguistics or systems theory. It has applications in the field of the natural and social sciences and engineering, such as control theory, operations research, social systems theory, systems biology, system dynamics, human factors, systems ecology, systems engineering and systems psychology. Themes commonly stressed in system science are (a) holistic view, (b) interaction between a system and its embedding environment, and (c) complex (often subtle) trajectories of dynamic behavior that sometimes are stable (and thus reinforcing), while at various 'boundary conditions' can become wildly unstable (and thus destructive). Concerns about Earth-scale biosphere/geosphere dynamics is an example of the nature of problems to which systems science seeks to contribute meaningful insights.
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A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that included a small number of ideographs, which were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes, generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries, use graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language. Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes, and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras. By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic) writing systems use graphemes that represent the units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes. Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. (Full article...)
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Turbulence in the tip vortex from an airplane wing. Studies of the critical point beyond which a system creates turbulence was important for Chaos theory, analyzed for example by the Soviet physicist Lev Landau who developed the Landau-Hopf theory of turbulence. David Ruelle and Floris Takens later predicted, against Landau, that fluid turbulence could develop through a strange attractor, a main concept of chaos theory.
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Selected biography -
Jules Henri Poincaré (UK: /ˈpwæ̃kɑːreɪ/, US: /ˌpwæ̃kɑːˈreɪ/; French: [ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe] ; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime, and made seminal contributions to mathematics. He has further been called the "Gauss of modern mathematics". Due to his success in science, influence and philosophy, he has been called "the philosopher par excellence of modern science."
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. Poincaré is regarded as the creator of the field of algebraic topology, and is further credited with introducing automorphic forms. He also made important contributions to algebraic geometry, number theory, complex analysis and Lie theory. He famously introduced the concept of the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which states that a state will eventually return arbitrarily close to its initial state after a sufficiently long time, which has far-reaching consequences. Early in the 20th century he formulated the Poincaré conjecture, which became, over time, one of the famous unsolved problems in mathematics. It was solved in 2002–2003 by Grigori Perelman. (Full article...)
Did you know
- ... * continuing vertically with a science of design,
- ... that the American ecologist Howard T. Odum in 1950 gave a novel definition of ecology as the study of large entities (ecosystems) at the "natural level of integration".
- ... that the Yugoslavian Mihajlo D. Mesarovic in 1970s wanted to provide a unified and formalized mathematical approach to all major systems concepts.
- ... that the American neurophysiologist Ralph W. Gerard late 1940s developed an intracellular recording microelectrode, that revolutionized research in neurobiology?
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