Jay W. Forrester

Jay Wright Forrester was born in Nebraska on 14 July 1918 and died on 16 November 2016, aged 98.^1,2 He spent his whole career at MIT, arriving as a graduate student in 1939 and retiring in 1989.^1,2 After the war he led Project Whirlwind, one of the first digital computers, and in 1949 invented magnetic core memory, an early form of RAM.^1,2

In 1956 he moved to what became the MIT Sloan School of Management and turned to the behaviour of organisations.^1,2 There he developed system dynamics, which describes a system as stocks that rise and fall through flows and feedback loops, and simulates it on a computer.^1,2 His book Industrial Dynamics (1961) used it to show that swings in a firm's inventory came from its own management practices, not from the market.^1,2 He also created the supply-chain exercise later known as the Beer Game.²

He then applied the method to a city in Urban Dynamics (1969) and to the planet in World Dynamics (1971), an integrated model of population, resources and economic growth.^1,2 World Dynamics was the starting point for the World3 model of The Limits to Growth, written in 1972 by four of his students.^1,2 His 1971 paper Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems argued that computer models of social systems expose the assumptions that people leave unstated in debate.¹

On the wiki, Incrementalism and complexity dates his system dynamics to the 1950s, and the System Dynamics Society award named after him appears in the entry on Stella Architect.