Jay Wright Forrester (July 14, 1918 – November 16, 2016) was an American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist.

[2] He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.

It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification.

[citation needed] During the late 1940s and early 50s, Forrester continued research in electrical and computer engineering at MIT, heading the Whirlwind project.

[3] The team perfected magnetic-core memory, and developed the "multi-coordinate digital information storage device"[9] (coincident-current system), the forerunner of today's RAM.

[3] Forrester was invited to join the board of Digital Equipment Corporation by Ken Olsen in 1957, and advised the early company on management science.

The study was the first model of supply chains proving that ups and downs of inventory is due to fluctuations in demand, revealing internal differences that his continuous approach could detect.

Several years later, interactions with former Boston Mayor John F. Collins led Forrester to write Urban Dynamics, which sparked an ongoing debate on the feasibility of modeling broader social problems.

[14]The paper summarized the results of a previous study on the system dynamics governing the economies of urban centers, which showed "how industry, housing, and people interact with each other as a city grows and decays."

The study's findings, presented more fully in Forrester's 1969 book Urban Dynamics, suggested that the root cause of depressed economic conditions was a shortage of job opportunities relative to the population level, and that the most popular solutions proposed at the time (e.g. increasing low-income housing availability, or reducing real estate taxes) counter-intuitively would worsen the situation by increasing this relative shortage.

The paper further argued that measures to reduce the shortage—such as converting land use from housing to industry, or increasing real estate taxes to spur property redevelopment—would be similarly counter-effective.

[15] 'Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems' also sketched a model of world dynamics that correlated population, food production, industrial development, pollution, availability of natural resources, and quality of life, and attempted future projections of those values under various assumptions.