Josiah Willard Gibbs in which he used as epigraph a remark attributed to Gibbs: "Mathematics is a language." Samuelson later explained that in his understanding of prices his "debts were not primarily to Pareto or Slutsky, but to the great thermodynamicist, Willard Gibbs of Yale." Mathematician Norbert Wiener cited Gibbs's use of probability in the formulation of statistical mechanics as "the first great revolution of twentieth century physics" and as a major influence on his conception of cybernetics. Wiener explained in the preface to his book "The Human Use of Human Beings" that it was "devoted to the impact of the Gibbsian point
System work by pushing on it). In 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius generalized this picture to include the concept of the surroundings and began to use the term "working body" when referring to the system. The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) became one of the pioneers of the general systems theory. In 1945 he introduced "models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relation or 'forces' between them." Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) and Ross Ashby (1903–1972), who pioneered the use of mathematics to study