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
Systematics – study of multi-term systems the problem of understanding ourselves and the world." He notes in this general context 4 branches of Systematics: Bennett's use of the term "Systematics" is basically synonymous with what today falls under the terms "systemics", "systemology", "systems science", and "systems theory". However, his own specific work under the name "Systematics" takes approaches that are still unfamiliar to many current systems specialists, making his work a specialty in a much broader field. In addition, the use of the term "systematics" in biology to refer to the classification of types and forms of organisms creates ambiguity and rather overwhelms the term's current