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

Born in Climax, a small town near Anselmo, Nebraska, Forrester is the founder of System Dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems. Industrial Dynamics was the first book Forrester wrote using System Dynamics to analyze industrial business cycles. Several years later, interactions with former Boston Mayor John F. Collins led Forrester to write Urban Dynamics, which sparked the ongoing debate on the feasibility of modeling broader social problems.

The unique insights of the urban dynamics model attracted the attention of urban planners around the world, eventually leading Forrester to meet a founder of the Club of Rome. He later met with the Club of Rome to discuss issues surrounding global sustainability and what followed was the book World Dynamics. World Dynamics took on modeling the complex interactions of the world economy, population and ecology, which was understandably met with a great deal of misunderstanding (see also Donella Meadows and Limits to Growth).

Forrester has made numerous other contributions to the field of System Dynamics and continues today promoting System Dynamics in education. He received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1982, and is currently Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Literature

• Forrester, Jay W., 1961. Industrial dynamics, Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.
• Forrester, Jay W., 1968. Principles of Systems, (2nd ed.). Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.
• Forrester, Jay W., 1969. Urban Dynamics, Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.
• Forrester, Jay W., 1973. World Dynamics, Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.
• Forrester, Jay W., 1975. Collected Papers of Jay W. Forrester, Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.

References

External links

• Selection of his papers
• Article: Designing the Future in pdf
• Article: Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems in pdf in html

1918 births | Living people | Computer pioneers | Operations research | Systems theory researchers | People from Nebraska | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | National Inventors Hall of Fame

Jay W. Forrester | Jay Forrester | Jay W. Forrester | Jay Wright Forrester | ジェイ・フォレスター | Jay Forrester