Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson
Rudolph Arnheim (L) and Bateson (R) speaking at the American Federation of Arts 48th Annual Convention, 1957 Apr 6 / Eliot Elisofon, photographer. American Federation of Arts records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Born	(1904-05-09)9 May 1904 Grantchester, UK
Died	4 July 1980(1980-07-04) (aged 76) San Francisco, US
Fields	anthropology, social sciences, linguistics, cybernetics, systems theory
Known for	double bind, ecology of mind, deuterolearning, schismogenesis
Influences	Conrad Hal Waddington
Influenced	John C. Lilly, Heinz von Foerster, Francis Jeffrey, Jerry Brown, Richard Bandler, Gilles Deleuze, John Grinder, Félix Guattari, Jay Haley, Don D. Jackson, Bradford Keeney, Stephen Nachmanovitch, William Irwin Thompson, R. D. Laing, Paul Watzlawick, Carl Whitaker, Niklas Luhmann, Sharon Traweek; biosemiotics, application of type theory in social sciences, communication theory, ethnicity theory,evolutionary biology, family therapy, brief therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, systemic coaching, anti-psychiatry, visual anthropology

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. He spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in different fields of science. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Angels Fear (published posthumously in 1987) was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.

Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904. He was the third and youngest son of (Caroline) Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. He was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the modern science of genetics.

The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a Bachelor of Arts in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1928. From 1931 to 1937 he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology. During 1936–1950 he was married to Margaret Mead. At that time he applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States.