Jay Wright Forrester

Jay Wright Forrester (July 14, 1918 – November 16, 2016) was an American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989. During World War II Forrester worked on servomechanisms as a research assistant to Gordon S. Brown. After the war he headed MIT's Whirlwind project, one of the first digital computers. There he is credited as a co-inventor of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development (between 1955 and 1975). It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification. His team is also believed to have created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a "jumping ball" on an oscilloscope. Later, Forrester was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he introduced the Forrester effect describing fluctuations in supply chains. He has been credited as a founder of system dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems. After his initial efforts in industrial simulation, Forrester attempted to simulate urban dynamics and then world dynamics, developing a model with the Club of Rome along the lines of the model popularized in The Limits to Growth. Today system dynamics is most often applied to research and consulting in organizations and other social systems.