Biography John L. Casti
received his Ph.D. in mathematics under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California in 1970. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, NYU and Princeton before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA] in Vienna, Austria. In 1986, he left IIASA to take up his current post as a Professor of Operations Research and System Theory at the Technical University of Vienna. He is also a Resident Member of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, where he is working on the application of biological metaphors to the mathematical modeling of problems in economics, finance and road-traffic networks. In addition, he has been actively working on the question of limits to scientific knowledge.