‎"WEAVER, WARREN.‎
‎Science and Complexity. - [CATEGORIZING COMPLEXITY]‎

‎[No printer], 1948. 8vo. In the original printed grey wrappers. Offprint from ""American Scientist, Autunmn Issue, 1948, Vol. 36, No. 4"". A very fine and clean copy, near mint. 536-544 pp.‎

Reference : 45476

‎Rare offprint issue of Weaver's famous essay on complexity ""in which he rather boldly claimed that while ""the 19th century was the century of disorganized complexity - the 20th century must be that of organized complexity"". Weaver is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation, and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States. Weaver stated that that the complexity of a particular system is the degree of difficulty in predicting the properties of the system, if the properties of the system's parts are given and he divides complexity between disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. This categorization has deeply influenced contemporary thinking about complexity.""For historical setting, this article was published shortly after World War II and is influenced by operations research and the first computers developed for for the war effort. During the war, Weaver headed the Applied Mathematics Panel (AAAS, 2004), a position that led to familiarity with many of the top scientists of the era. It was a time of great advances in science and optimism for more growth in the future. This article was also written at the time Weaver was formulating ideas that would later be published with Claude Shannon in The mathematical theory of communication, which laid the foundation for information theory. Weaver's thoughts during this time on how computers might be employed in machine translation were later collected in his famous memorandum on the topic that ""formulated goals and methods before most people had any idea of what computers might be capable of"". (Griffin, Information theory of Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver).‎