William Ross Ashby
William Ross Ashby, called Ross Ashby, ( born September 6, 1903 in London, England; † November 15, 1972 ) was a British psychiatrist and pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. A study by the State University of New York honored him in 1978 as the most influential person in the system sciences. His works Introduction to Cybernetics and Design for a Brain were influential since they appeared in the 1950s in the sciences of complex systems, which were known under the term cybernetics at the time.
Biography
Ashby studied from 1921 to 1924 at the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College) with a bachelor's degree in Zoology, but was also of versatile interests such as astronomy and higher mathematics, which he studied self-taught. He studied medicine after graduation in Cambridge at St. Bartholomew's Hopital in London. From 1930 to 1936 he was a psychiatrist at Leavesdon Mental Hospital in Hertfordshire. In 1931 he married and out of the marriage were born three daughters. 1936 to 1947 he was a pathologist, bacteriologist and biochemist at St. Andrew's Mental Hospital. At that time he had started to systems theory to deal with the brain. 1945/46, he was drafted into the Major to 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, who introduced the first in the UK in 1939 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT ) and Ashby made so contiguous in biochemical studies. Ashby he was in charge of research. In 1947 he built there from old electronic parts of the military his Homöostaten, a self-regulating, responding to external environmental influences machine which then caused a sensation and was portrayed in a 1949 Time article as The thinking machine. In 1952 he published his book Design for a brain that made him famous and earned him an invitation from Warren McCulloch to Macy Conference in New York. He arrived in the United States, among others, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Mina Rees, Seymour S. Kety and Walter Pitts. His former hobby has now increasingly his main occupation. 1955 and 1956 he was invited to the Center for Behavioral Science at Stanford University and in 1956 he published his Introduction to Cybernetics. 1959/60 he was Director of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, was predominantly administrative activity but again and went in 1961 in the U.S. to the Biological Computing Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. In 1970 he retired and lived again in his house north Bristol. He had an honorary professorship at the University of Wales in Cardiff a while.
Ashby was one of an interdisciplinary combination of former Cambridge student who called himself The Ratio Club and the Alan Turing belonged.
Works and impact
Although he was very influential in the science of complex systems, it is today not as well known such as Norbert Wiener and Herbert Simon. Ashby's law bears his name, and he provided the scientific basis for the homeostatic principle and the principles of self- organization.
Works
- Principles of the Self -Organizing Dynamic System, Journal of General Psychology 37 (1947) 125-128 ( first printed mention of the term " self-organizing ").
- The applications of cybernetics to psychiatry, Journal of Mental Science 100 (1954) 114-124
- Design for on intelligence amplifier, Automata studies, Princeton 1956
- The effect of experience on a determinate dynamic system, Behavioral Science 1 (1956 ) 35-42
- Design for a Brain, Chapman & Hall, 2nd edition, 1966, ISBN 0-412-20090-2 ( first edition, 1952)
- Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, 1956, ISBN 0-416-68300-2 (also available electronically as a PDF file in the Principia Cybernetica ( http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html ) ); Dt: . Introduction to cybernetics. Q.s. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974; 2nd edition 1985 ( Suhrkamp Taschenbuch science; 34) ISBN 3-518-27634-4
- W. Principles of Self- Organizing Systems in Heinz von Foerster and George Zopf, Jr. (eds. ), Principles of Self- Organization ( Sponsored by Information Systems Branch, U.S. Office of Naval Research ), 1962