Systems theory to social sciences (see David Easton's seminal development of the "political system" as an analytical construct), the original theorists explored the implications of twentieth century advances in terms of systems. People have studied subjects like complexity, self-organization, connectionism and adaptive systems in the 1940s and 1950s. In fields like cybernetics, researchers such as Norbert Wiener, William Ross Ashby, John von Neumann and Heinz von Foerster, examined complex systems mathematically. John von Neumann discovered cellular automata and self-reproducing systems, again with only pencil and paper. Aleksandr Lyapunov and Jules Henri Poincaré worked on the foundations of chaos theory without any computer
William James Sidis of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading". Regardless of the exaggerations, Sidis is judged by other high IQ peers such as MIT Physics professor Daniel Frost Comstock and notable American mathematician Norbert Wiener to have had real ability. Sidis' life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book "" (1991). Sidis is also discussed in "Ex-Prodigy", an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself and a contemporary of Sidis at Harvard. A Danish author Morten Brask wrote a fictional novel based on Sidis' life; "The Perfect