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
Scientific socialism He criticizes this approach as unscientific as its claims cannot be tested and in particular are not subject to being disproven. Scientific socialism Scientific socialism is a term coined in 1840 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his "What is Property?" to mean a society ruled by a scientific government, i.e. one whose sovereignity rests upon reason, rather than sheer will: Thus, in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that society has reached; and the probable duration of that authority can be calculated from the more or less general