The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
Gathered here are Ludwig von Bertalanffy's writings on general systems theory, selected and edited to show the evolution of systems theory and to present it applications to problem solving.
An attempt to formulate common laws that apply to virtually every scientific field, this conceptual approach has had a profound impact on such widely diverse disciplines as biology, economics, psychology, and demography.