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
ARC Centre for Complex Systems systems science is an emerging discipline developing new ways of investigating large, highly intricate, dynamically changing systems across diverse areas such as biology, social networks and socio-technological systems, economics and the environment. The ACCS was established to conduct world-class research on questions fundamental to understanding, designing and managing complex systems. While complex systems research is considered basic research, with commercialisation still some time off, complex computing holds answers to real-life systems. The ACCS provided a focus for complex systems science research in Australia, and developed strong infrastructure for modelling and analysing network-based systems, enabling the science to be applied to