梅萨·罗维奇(Mihajlo D. Mesarovic)——系统管理学派主要代表人物之一,数学系统理论的代表人物。
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Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928), (Serbian: Mihajlo D. Mesarović, Serbian Cyrillic: Михајло Д. Месаровић) is a Yugoslavian scientist, who is a professor of Systems Engineering and Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University. Mesarovic was pioneer in the field of systems theory, he was UNESCO Scientific Advisor on Global change and also a member of the Club of Rome.
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic was born in Yugoslavia in 1928. He was awarded the M.S. degree in electrical engineer from University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1951. In 1955 he received a Ph.D. in Technical sciences from the University of Belgrade. In 1958 he became a Sloane Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT.
Mesarovic held academic positions at University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia form 1954 to 1958. He was associate Professor at CWRU from 1959 to 1964 and professor from 1964 to 1978. In that time he was head of the Systems Engineering Group 1965-68, head of the Systems Engineering Department 1968-72 and director of the Systems Research Center 1968-78. Starting 1978, Prof. Mesarovic has been the Cady Staley Professor of Systems Engineering and Mathematics. One of his students was Roger W. Brockett.
He has lectured in more than 60 countries, advised government officials on a variety of issues, consulted for international organizations, and published widely.[1] He was also the founder of the 'Mathematical Theory of General Systems' Journal, Springer Verlag.
In 1999, he was appointed a Scientific Advisor on Global Change by Federico Mayor, Director-General of the UNESCO. In that role, Mesarovic traveled to UNESCO's headquarters in Paris and advised the director general's office on issues such as climate change, economics, population, technology transfer, and the education of women in developing countries.[2]
In 2003 he was awarded the Hovorka Prize from Case Western Reserve University for exceptional achievements.[1]
His research interests include the following areas: Complexity, Complex systems theory, Global Change and Sustainable Human development, Hierarchical Systems, Large-scale systems theory, Mathematical theory of general systems, Multi-level systems, Systems biology, and World and regional modeling. His first publication in 1960 was about Multi-variable Control Systems. In the field of mathematics he was founder of:
The last ten years of his career, he has concentrated his teaching at the undergraduate level, focusing on future-oriented and interdisciplinary education. Hereby he developed the “Global Issues: A Critical Thinking and Problem-solving Approach” course popular with both engineering and arts and sciences students.
Mathematical systems theory
Mathematical research on systems theory, according to Mesarovic, is traceable to the work of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Laplace, Gauss, and Jaromír Korčák, among others. They tried to find solutions for difficult physical problems in dynamics connected with so-called systems of the world. Since the 16th century these scientists provided both knowledge and improved navigational techniques.
In the second half of the 19th century systems theory evolved in technology, influenced by physico-mathematical inquiries such as on power-plant governors from J. C. Maxwell on position control system of the steering engine of ships from N. Minorsky and in the 20th century beginning with Norbert Wiener on extrapolation of servo mechanisms and other cybernetic systems. Further developments here were by Claude Shannon on communication systems, secrecy systems, and digital switching systems. By R.E. Kalman on general linear filters. And since the 1950s the research on adaptive or self-organizing control systems by W. Ross Ashby, R. E. Bellman, L.A. Zadeh and others.
In Mesarovic's General systems theory: Mathematical foundations (1975) he wanted to provide a unified and formalized mathematical approach to all major systems concepts. He doesn't look at any practical applications nor philosophical ramifications of general systems theory. His attention is devoted to formal aspects of deterministic input-output systems, learning systems, decision-making systems, and goal-seeking systems, per se.
The development of mathematical models for general systems theory has been extensively developed by Mihajlo D. Mesarovic. His “A Mathematical Theory of General Systems,” has developed measures for system properties. This work restricts to the measures to “General Systems Theory of Hierarchical Systems.”. Mesarovic also introduces a “coordination strategy” to adjust the theoretical projections with actual observations. As described, it appears to simply classify two sets of systems, those that can be adjusted and those that cannot. Now Mesarovic has contributed greatly to the mathematical development of general systems theory. His system models however were not founded on theory. One such model is the WIM (World Integrated Model) that was developed with 49 subroutines. It was quite refined in that it utilized about 21,000 numbers to describe the state of the global system at any one time.
Systems biology
Mesarovic remains active in the field of systems biology. In 1968, he published Systems Theory and Biology and organized a “Systems Theory and Biology” symposium at Case, launching a new scientific discipline, from which the Department of Biomedical Engineering evolved. In 1976 he wrote about complex systems biology, with Takahara. And in 2004 he became the senior investigator of the Systems Biology and Mismatch Repair Project, an NIH-sponsored study.
Complex systems biology is the application of complex systems knowledge to understanding biological problems. This builds on the paradigm of organized complexity and requires a search for organizing principles. For example, therapeutics needs to search for devices, drug targets etc. guided by organizing principles.
Systems biology can be divided according to Mesarovic in two:
Complex systems theory
In the late 1960s, anticipating that complexity would become a defining paradigm for the next century, he developed theoretical tools that have found applications in many scientific disciplines and in global issues, particularly environmental problems.
Global issues and sustainable development
The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at a meeting of 30 scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and international and national civil servants. In 1972 they published "Limits to Growth" which projected the extinction of vital resources within 100 years. Suddenly the Third World was being told that growth wasn't the solution to poverty after all, and to forget all that stuff about development policy.
In 1974, with colleague Eduard Pestel, Mesarovic published, "Mankind at the Turning Point", a nonfiction bestseller in Europe, which has been described as “An enormous step forward in our understanding of the essence of the worst bottlenecks our world is facing.”
GLOBESIGHT: A Reasoning Support Tool
In the 1996 article Cybernetics of global change: human dimension and managing of complexity Mesarovic, McGinnis and West laid out some philosophical concepts for a scenario analysis program GLOBESIGHT: A Reasoning Support Tool. This program GLOBal foreSIGHT is useful in understanding the past, evaluating the present and looking into different feasible (not probable or just possible) futures. The program is developed by the Global Systems Group jointly with Mihajlo D. Mesarovic and Sree N. Sreenath at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
The GLOBESIGHT analysis support system consists of four modules:
Regionalized Multi-level World Models Decision
Mesarovic wrote and was editor of a dozen books and numerous articles. Some of his work is translated into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Persian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.[3]