What's our take on:
War
What's our take on:
The Global Economy
What's our take on:
Oil
John Casti
Received his Ph.D. in mathematics under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California in 1970. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, NYU and Princeton before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. In 1986, Casti left IIASA to take up a position as a Professor of Operations Research and System Theory at the Technical University of Vienna. He was a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, where he spent years working on the application of biological metaphors to the mathematical modeling of problems in economics, finance and road-traffic networks.
Over the past few years, Casti has written numerous articles and seven technical monographs and textbooks on mathematical modeling. In addition, he is the editor of the journals Applied Mathematics & Computation (Elsevier, New York) and served as founding editor of the magazine Complexity (Wiley, New York). In 1989 his text/reference work Alternate Realities: Mathematical Models of Nature and Man (Wiley, 1989) was awarded a prize by the Association of American Publishers in a competition among all scholarly books published in mathematics and the natural sciences. In 1992, Casti also published Reality Rules (Wiley, New York), a two-volume text on mathematical modeling.
In addition to these technical volumes, Casti has written several popular books on science: Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science (Morrow, 1989), which addresses several of the most puzzling controversies in modern science, Searching for Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About the Future (Morrow, 1991), a volume dealing with problems of scientific prediction and explanation of everyday events like the weather, stock market price movements and the outbreak of warfare, and Complexification (HarperCollins, 1994), a study of complex systems and the manner in which they give rise to counterintuitive, surprising behavior. Other popular science volumes by Casti include Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics and Why They Matter. It was published by John Wiley & Sons (New York) in September 1995, Would-Be Worlds, a volume on computer simulation and the way it promises to change the way we do science. It published by John Wiley & Sons (New York) in October 1996. In 1998 he published a volume of "scientific fiction", involving Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, J.B.S. Haldane, C.P. Snow and Erwin Schroedinger in a dinner-party conversation on the question of the uniqueness of human cognition and the possibility of thinking machines. It was published under the title The Cambridge Quintet by Little, Brown (UK) in December 1997 and by Addison-Wesley in the US in early 1998.
More recently, Casti's published books include Art & Complexity (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2003), a volume edited with A. Karlqvist, and The One, True, Platonic Heaven (Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2003), which addresses in a fictional format the question of the limits to scientific knowledge.
Casti's current research interests have also shifted somewhat to the exploration of questions in the social and behavioral realm and the relationship between social "moods" and their consequent social actions and behaviors. In this direction, he is currently in the process of writing a book, Destiny's Design (Wiley, London and New York, 2006) addressing the directions and patterns of social causation and their implications for future trends and collective social events, such as styles in popular culture, the outcome of political processes, and even the rise and fall of civilizations.