Portal:Systems science



The systems science portal

Complex systems approach

Systems science is an transdisciplinary[1] field that studies the nature of systems—from simple to complex—in nature, society, cognition, engineering, technology and science itself. To systems scientists, the world can be understood as a system of systems. The field aims to develop interdisciplinary foundations that are applicable in a variety of areas, such as psychology, biology, medicine, communication, business management, engineering, and social sciences.

Systems science covers formal sciences such as complex systems, cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, information theory, linguistics or systems theory. It has applications in the field of the natural and social sciences and engineering, such as control theory, operations research, social systems theory, systems biology, system dynamics, human factors, systems ecology, systems engineering and systems psychology. Themes commonly stressed in system science are (a) holistic view, (b) interaction between a system and its embedding environment, and (c) complex (often subtle) trajectories of dynamic behavior that sometimes are stable (and thus reinforcing), while at various 'boundary conditions' can become wildly unstable (and thus destructive). Concerns about Earth-scale biosphere/geosphere dynamics is an example of the nature of problems to which systems science seeks to contribute meaningful insights.


This list of metro systems includes electrified rapid transit train systems worldwide. In some parts of the world, metro systems are referred to as subways, undergrounds, tubes, mass rapid transit (MRT), metrô or U-Bahn. As of 1 April 2025, 204 cities in 65 countries operate 917 metro lines.

The London Underground first opened as an underground railway in 1863 and its first electrified underground line, the City and South London Railway, opened in 1890, making it the world's first deep-level electric metro system. The Budapest Millennium Underground Railway, which opened in 1896, was the world's first electric underground railway specifically designed for urban transportation and is still in operation today. The Shanghai Metro is both the world's longest metro network at 808 kilometres (502 mi) and the busiest with the highest annual ridership reaching approximately 2.83 billion passenger trips. The New York City Subway has the greatest number of stations, with 472. As of 2024, the country with the most metro systems is China, with 54 in operation, including 11 of the 12 longest networks in the world. (Full article...)

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This image illustrates part of the Mandelbrot set fractal. The size of the JPEG file encoding the bitmap of this image is more than 17 kilobytes (approximately 140000 bits). The same file can be generated by a computer program much shorter than 140000 bits, however. Thus, the Kolmogorov complexity of the JPEG file encoding the bitmap is much less than 140000.

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Hendrik Wade Bode (/ˈbdi, -də/ BOH-dee, -⁠də, Dutch: [ˈboːdə]; December 24, 1905 – June 21, 1982) was an American engineer, researcher, inventor, author and scientist, of Dutch ancestry. As a pioneer of modern control theory and electronic telecommunications he revolutionized both the content and methodology of his chosen fields of research. His synergy with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, laid the foundations for the technological convergence of the Information Age.

He made important contributions to the design, guidance and control of anti-aircraft systems during World War II. He helped develop the automatic artillery weapons that defended London from the V-1 flying bombs during WWII. After the war, Bode along with his wartime rival Wernher von Braun, developer of the V-2 rocket, and, later, the father of the US space program, served as members of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of NASA. During the Cold War, he contributed to the design and control of missiles and anti-ballistic missiles. (Full article...)

Did you know

  • ... that a multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents, which can be used to solve problems which are impossible for monolithic system to solve.
  • ... that the Austrian American Heinz von Foerster in 1960 in Science magazine stated, that the human population would reach "infinity" and he proposed a formula for predicting future population growth.
  • ... * then a science of complexity,
  • ... that the American ecologist Howard T. Odum in 1950 gave a novel definition of ecology as the study of large entities (ecosystems) at the "natural level of integration".

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