Old Markets, 1900-1950

The usual markets supporting academic math departments are:
  • the undergraduate and graduate programs (eg, the sciences and math itself)
  • professional schools (eg, engineering and the medical sciences), and
  • other professions (eg, therapy, the arts, management)
We might visualize a bifurcation diagram in which these markets appear as attractors with basins and boundaries, as in the preceeding CD fold catastrophe model for paradigm shifts. In this view, the main bifurcation events 1900-1950 include:
  • 1907, mathematical biology (Lotka)
  • 1942, digital neural nets (McCulloch-Pitts)
  • 1946, cybernetics (Wiener-von Neumann)
  • 1947, mathematical social sciences (Rashevsky)
  • 1950, general systems theory (von Bertalanffy)

Revised by Ralph, 02 May 2003