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
Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications is actively involved in research project involved with waveform design, dimension reduction, geospatial terrain and image processing, data fusion, phase retrieval frames, and analysis on graphs. The Norbert Wiener Center hosts the annual conference, the February Fourier Talks (FFT). The first FFT was held in 2002 and 2003, and then annually since 2006. The aim of the annual FFT is to bring together researchers from academia, government, and industry, as a means to spur innovation and foster interaction in Harmonic Analysis and its Applications. The FFT lasts two days and consists of approximately 15 half-hour talks, a distinguished lecture, a