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
Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems (MEMOCS) is a half-yearly peer-reviewed scientific journal founded by the International Research Center for the Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems (M&MoCS) from Università degli Studi dell'Aquila, in Italy. It is published by Mathematical Sciences Publishers, and first issued in February 2013. The co-chairs of the editorial board are Francesco dell'Isola and Gilles Francfort, and chair managing editor is Martin Ostoja-Starzewski. "MEMOCS" is indexed in Scopus, MathSciNet and Zentralblatt MATH. It is open access, free of author charges (being supported by grants from academic institutions), and available in