William Ross Ashby
| W. Ross Ashby | |
|---|---|
| Born |
6 September 1903 London, England |
| Died | 15 November 1972 (aged 69) |
| Fields | Psychiatry, Cybernetics, Systems theory |
| Known for | Cybernetics, Law of Requisite Variety, Principle of Self-Organization, Principle of Self-organization |
| Influenced | Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Herbert A. Simon, Stafford Beer, Walter Cannon, William T. Powers and Stuart Kauffman |
W. Ross Ashby (London, 6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential.
William Ross Ashby was born in 1903 in London, where his father was working at an advertising agency. From 1917 to 1921, William studied at the Edinburgh Academy in Scotland, and from 1921 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he received his B.A. in 1924 and his M.B. and B.Ch. in 1928. From 1924 to 1928 he worked at the St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Later on he also received a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1931, and an M.A. 1930 and M.D. from Cambridge in 1935.
Ross Ashby started working in 1930 as a Clinical Psychiatrist in the London County Council. From 1936 until 1947 he was a Research Pathologist in the St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton in England. From 1945 to 1947 he served in India where he was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
When he returned to England, he served as Director of Research of the Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester from 1947 until 1959. For a year, he was Director of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. In 1960, he went to the United States and became Professor, Depts. of Biophysics and Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his retirement in 1970.
Ashby was president of the Society for General Systems Research from 1962 to 1964. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatry in 1971.
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