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 Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) is a division of the Mathematics Department in the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences devoted to research and education in pure and applied harmonic analysis. The center, named after acclaimed scientist Norbert Wiener was founded in 2004 and is based out of the Mathematics Building on the University of Maryland, College Park campus. It is supported by the University of Maryland, the National Science Foundation, and local industries with which it interacts. Currently, the Norbert Wiener Center