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
Wiener series Wiener series In mathematics, the Wiener series (or "Wiener G-functional expansion") originates from the 1958 book of Norbert Wiener. It is an orthogonal expansion for nonlinear functionals closely related to the Volterra series and having the same relation to it as an orthogonal Hermite polynomial expansion has to a power series. For this reason it is also known as the "Wiener-Hermite expansion". The analogue of the coefficients are referred to as Wiener kernels. The terms of the series are orthogonal (uncorrelated) with respect to a statistical input of white noise. This property allows the terms to be identified in applications