History of SD Education

I don’t think Rice University is often mentioned in the list of places to get an education in SD, and I don’t know its current offerings. It did offer a course in SD in the early 1970s, as you can see in Sidney Burrus, former dean and pioneer in digital signal processing, dies at 86 by scrolling down to the second picture, seemingly of a World model output. I am close to 100% sure this was taken post-1971, not in 1965, for many reasons, including the haircut and the fact that the apparently-associated text shows reference modes with data out through at least 1972 but mostly because the More Information tab of the text linked below says, “This collection develops the ideas of model, dynamics, and simulation that have been used successfully in science and engineering in a way to be applied in the social sciences. These notes were originally used in a course at Rice University taught to engineering and social science students in 1973-74.”

That text, Dynamics of Social Systems, is available on OpenStax.

I find it interesting to see early views of SD and how a pproaches might have evolved over time.

Thanks for the reference to the course. We often forget that the semantics of systems thinking and system dynamics have been fairly stable.

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