Jay Forrester - Definition and Overview

Jay Wright Forrester (born 14 July 1918 Climax, Nebraska) is an American pioneer of computer engineering. He headed the Whirlwind project at the beginning of the 1950s the "Multi-coordinate digitally information storage device", the forerunner today's RAM. He created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a "jumping ball" on an oscilloscope.

Forrester is considered one of the inventors of system dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems. He has written several books and papers on system principles and dynamics. He is currently Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

He wrote a book "World Dynamics" on modeling the world economy, population and ecology. The paper "A Dynamic World Model" by D. H. Brownlee (in American Society for Engineering Education Transactions on Computers in Education 1973 Vol. 5) implements this model on an analogue computer. It concludes that the only hope for mankind is massive depopulation resulting from a nuclear war!

External links

• Selection of his papers in pdf (http://sysdyn.clexchange.org/people/jay-forrester.html)
• Article: Designing the Future in pdf (http://sysdyn.clexchange.org/sdep/papers/Designjf.pdf)