Jay Forrester

Jay Wright Forrester was an American computer engineer and systems scientist who spent his entire fifty-year career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from entering as a graduate student in 1939 to retiring in 1989. He led the Whirlwind project, one of the earliest digital computers, and his team there co-invented magnetic core memory, which became the dominant form of computer memory from roughly 1955 to 1975 and was a foundational technology for the computer industry of that era. Moving to the MIT Sloan School of Management, he founded the field of system dynamics, using computer simulation to model the feedback loops driving complex organizational and economic behavior; his 1961 book Industrial Dynamics introduced what became known as the bullwhip effect in supply chains, and his later urban and global dynamics models influenced both the video game SimCity and The Limits to Growth, an influential study on resource sustainability commissioned by the Club of Rome. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1972 and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1989.