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Jay Wright Forrester
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American operations researcher (1918–2016)
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1918
- Died
- 2016
- Works
- 9
Top works
- Forrester
- Advertising
- System dynamics
- The changing face of industry; the role of industrial dynamics
- Collected papers of Jay W. Forrester
via Open Library + Wikidata
Academic profile · OpenAlex
- Works
- 1
- Cited by
- 0
Research areas
Most cited works
- Henry Ford (1863–1947) 1012003 · 0 cit
via OpenAlex · CC0
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage
· 1991 · cited 35,120x
- Geant4—a simulation toolkit
· 2003 · cited 20,919x
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
· 2016 · cited 11,429x
- Genome engineering using the CRISPR-Cas9 system
· 2013 · cited 10,755x
- Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure
· 2003 · cited 10,038x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Pestel was a very forceful person and quickly saw the power of system dynamics.”
- “No plea about inadequacy of our understanding of the decision-making processes can excuse us from estimating decision making criteria. To omit a decision point is to deny its presence – a mistake of far greater magnitude than any errors in our best estimate of the process.”
- “[The engineer] must identify the significant and critical problems, but in his education, problems have been predetermined and assigned. He must develop the judgment to know what solutions to problems are possible, but in school the problems encountered are known to have answers. He should be excited by new and unsolved challenges, but for 20 years he has lived in an educational system where he knows he is repeating the work of last year's students.”
- “In concept a feedback system is a closed system. Its dynamic behavior arises within its internal structure. Any action which is essential to the behavior of the mode being investigated must be included inside the system boundary.”
- “Formulating a model of a system should start from the question “Where is the boundary, that encompasses the smallest number of components, within which the dynamic behavior under study is generated?””
- “It seems traditional for explicit models of social systems to be greeted by vague criticisms about their lack of perfection. Instead, we need equally explicit alternatives with a demonstration that the alternative leads to a different and more plausible set of conclusions. By proposal and counter proposition our understanding of social systems can advance.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- ( 1918-07-14 ) July 14, 1918, Anselmo, Nebraska , U.S.
- Died
- November 16, 2016 (2016-11-16) (aged 98), Concord, Massachusetts , U.S.
- Education
- University of Nebraska ( BS ), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MS )
- Known for
- MIT Whirlwind Random-access memory Forrester effect
- Awards
- IEEE Medal of Honor (1972) Howard N. Potts Medal National Medal of Technology and Innovation (1989) Computer History Museum Fellow (1995)
- Institutions
- MIT Sloan School of Management (1956)
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
Show 3 more facts
- date of birth
- 1918-07-14
- date of death
- 2016-11-16
- ACM Classification Code (2012)
- 10011397
via Wikidata · CC0
~12 min read
Article
Jay Wright Forrester (July 14, 1918 – November 16, 2016) was an American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
During World War II Forrester worked on servomechanisms as a research assistant to Gordon S. Brown. After the war he headed MIT's Whirlwind project, one of the first digital computers. There he is credited as a co-inventor of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development (between 1955 and 1975). It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification. His team is also believed to have created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a "jumping ball" on an oscilloscope.