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
Leo Wiener the United States alone, with the purpose of creating a vegetarian commune in Belize. Then, after having travelled and worked around the country, he went to Kansas City, Missouri, and started working as a teacher. He was a polyglot, and was reputed to speak thirty languages well. Beginning in 1896, Wiener lectured on Slavic cultures at Harvard University and became the first American professor of Slavic literature. He translated 24 volumes of Leo Tolstoy's works into English. He taught George Rapall Noyes. He was the father of MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. Leo Wiener Leo Wiener (1862–1939) was an American historian,