John Casti

Key takeaways

John Casti belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect John Casti to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of John Casti from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

John L. Casti (born 1943) is an author, complexity scientist, systems theorist, mathematician and entrepreneur.

As an author Casti has written more than 120 scientific articles, seven technical monographs and textbooks on mathematical modeling. He was also the former editor of the journals Applied Mathematics & Computation and Complexity. Casti has written 14 popular books on science. These include Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science, which addresses several of the most puzzling controversies in modern science; Searching for Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About the Future, 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, a study of complex systems and the manner in which they give rise to counterintuitive, surprising behavior. In addition, he published Would-Be Worlds in 1996, a volume on computer simulation and the way it promises to change the way scientific exploration is conducted. Meanwhile, Dr. Casti has also written three volumes on mathematics: Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics and Why They Matter, a sequel, Five More Golden Rules, and Mathematical Mountaintops: The Five Most Famous Problems of All Time, published and later recalled by Oxford University Press. In 1992, he published Reality Rules, a two-volume text on mathematical modeling. In 1989, his written work Alternate Realities: Mathematical Models of Nature and Man was awarded a prize by the Association of American Publishers in a competition among scholarly books published in mathematics and the natural sciences. In recent years, Casti has shifted his literary focus to science fiction. In 1998 he published The Cambridge Quintet, a volume of scientific fiction involving Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, J. B. S. Haldane, C. P. Snow and Erwin Schrödinger in a fictional dinner-party conversation centered about the question of the uniqueness of human cognition and the possibility of thinking machines. More recently, his published books include Art & Complexity, a volume edited with A. Karlqvist, as well as a short volume on the life of Kurt Gödel published in 2003 titled Gödel: A Life of Logic. In the same year he published the volume, The One, True, Platonic Heaven, which addresses in a fictional format the question of the limits to scientific knowledge. The volume on art and complexity sparked off a continuing interest in the interrelationship between complex systems and artistic forms of all types, which is reflected in a set of papers currently in preparation addressing the complexity of scientific theories regarded as artistic forms. In other literary pursuits, he published a neo-noir thriller entitled Prey for Me in 2020.

Plagiarism In 2002, Casti's newest book, Mathematical Mountaintops, was recalled by Oxford University Press due to "rampant plagiarism". According to the New York Times, in the book, Casti had "lifted" passages and images from mathematicians and writers such as Thomas Callister Hales, William Dunham, Barry Arthur Cipra, and Simon Singh. In another incident two years later, Casti retracted one of his articles, "Losing games for your winning play", that had been published in the journal Complexity. In the retraction notice, Casti admitted that it had been "... plagiarized in its entirety from the article by Erica Klarreich, 'Playing Both Sides' in the January/February issue of The Sciences." Casti apologized to Klarreich, as well as to Paul Davies, for plagiarizing their work.

Mathematician As a mathematician and researcher, Casti received his Ph.D. under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, New York University and Princeton University, before moving to Vienna in 1973 to become one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. In 1986, he left IIASA to take up a position as a professor of operations research and system theory at the Technical University of Vienna. He also served as a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, from 1992 to 2002, where he worked extensively on the application of biological metaphors to the mathematical modeling of problems in economics, finance and road-traffic networks, as well as on large-scale computer simulations for the study of such networks. His primary research interests have shifted somewhat in recent years from the natural sciences to the exploration of questions in the social and behavioral realm. One thread has been exploration of the relationship between the social "mood" of a population and its biasing effect on actions and behaviors. In this direction, his 2010 book, Mood Matters: From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers, addresses 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. His most recent book is X-EVENTS: The Collapse of Everything, which addresses the underlying cause of extreme events generated by human inattention, misunderstanding, error, stupidity, or malevolent intent.

Entrepreneur

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Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with John Casti

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what John Casti claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to John Casti before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about John Casti ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of John Casti

In research: John Casti appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses John Casti in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: John Casti is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1943 births, 20th-century American male writers, 20th-century American mathematicians, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for John Casti outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study John Casti in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what John Casti means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain John Casti out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is John Casti in simple terms?

John L. Casti (born 1943) is an author, complexity scientist, systems theorist, mathematician and entrepreneur.

Why does John Casti matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study John Casti?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on John Casti.