W. Ross Ashby

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William Ross Ashby (born September 6, 1903 in London , England, † November 15, 1972 ) was a British universal scientist who u. a. worked as a psychiatrist and biochemist. He is considered a pioneer in cybernetics , the study of complex systems . His works Introduction to Cybernetics and Design for a Brain have pioneered the field since they appeared in the 1950s. A study by the State University of New York in 1978 recognized him as the most influential person in systems science .

biography

Career

Ashby studied from 1921 to 1924 at Cambridge University (Sidney Sussex College) with a bachelor's degree in zoology, but also had diverse interests such as astronomy and higher mathematics, which he studied autodidactically. After graduating from Cambridge, he studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hopital in London. From 1930 to 1936 he was a psychiatrist at Leavesdon Mental Hospital in Hertfordshire . From 1936 to 1947 he was a pathologist, bacteriologist and biochemist at St. Andrew's Mental Hospital. It was then that he began to deal with the brain in systems theory. In 1945/46 he was drafted as a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India. From 1947 until its closure in 1958, he was a biochemist at Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester , also a mental hospital that was the first in Great Britain to introduce electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in 1939 . As head of research, he carried out related biochemical investigations. In 1947 he built his homeostat there from old electronic parts of the military , a self-regulating machine that reacts to external environmental influences, which at the time caused a sensation and was portrayed in a Time article in 1949 as The thinking machine . In 1952, his book Design for a brain was published , which made him famous and earned him an invitation from Warren McCulloch to the Macy Conference in New York. In the USA he met Norbert Wiener , Claude Shannon , Mina Rees , Seymour S. Kety and Walter Pitts, among others . His previous hobby has now increasingly become his main occupation. In 1955 and 1956 he was invited to the Center for Behavioral Science at Stanford University and in 1956 his Introduction to Cybernetics appeared. In 1959/60 he was director of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, but gave up the predominantly administrative work again and in 1961 went to the USA to the Biological Computer Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . In 1970 he retired and moved back to his home north of Bristol. For a while he was an honorary professor at the University of Wales at Cardiff.

Private

Ashby had been married since 1931. The marriage produced three daughters.

He was a member of an interdisciplinary association of former Cambridge students called The Ratio Club , of which Alan Turing was a member.

Works and effect

Although he was very influential in the science of complex systems, he is not as well known today as Norbert Wiener or Herbert A. Simon . Ashby's law bears his name and it provided the scientific basis for the homeostatic principle and the principles of self-organization .

Fonts

  • Principles of the Self-Organizing Dynamic System. In: Journal of General Psychology. Vol. 37, 1947, pp. 125–128 (first printed mention of the term “self-organizing”).
  • The applications of cybernetics to psychiatry. In: Journal of Mental Science. Vol. 100, 1954, pp. 114-124
  • Design for an intelligence amplifier. Automata studies, Princeton 1956
  • The effect of experience on a determinate dynamic system. In: Behavioral Science. Vol. 1, 1956, pp. 35-42
  • Design for a brain. 1952; 2nd edition: Chapman & Hall, 1966, ISBN 0-412-20090-2
  • Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, 1956, ISBN 0-416-68300-2 ( PDF )
    • Introduction to cybernetics (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. 34). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1974, ISBN 3-518-27634-4
  • Principles of Self-Organizing Systems. In: Heinz von Foerster & George W. Zopf, Jr. (Eds.): Principles of Self-Organization. Sponsored by Information Systems Branch, US Office of Naval Research, 1962

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ George J. Klir: Applied General System Research: Recent Developments and Trends. Plenum Press, New York 1978.
personal data
SURNAME Ashby, W. Ross
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ashby, William Ross; Ashby, WR
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1972