"Any pattern of activity in a network, regarded as consistent by some observer, is a system, Certain groups of observers, who share a common body of knowledge, and subscribe to a particular discipline, like 'physics' or 'biology' (in terms of which they pose hypotheses about the network), will pick out substantially the same systems. On the other hand, observers belonging to different groups will not agree about the activity which is a system." (Gordon Pask, The Natural History of Networks, 1960)
"It is of our very nature to see the universe as a place that we can talk about. In particular, you will remember, the brain tends to compute by organizing all of its input into certain general patterns. It is natural for us, therefore, to try to make these grand abstractions, to seek for one formula, one model, one God, around which we can organize all our communication and the whole business of living." (John Z Young, "Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain", 1960)
"How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern." (Edmund R Leach, "Rethinking Anthropology", 1961)
"Mathematics is a creation of the mind. To begin with, there is a collection of things, which exist only in the mind, assumed to be distinguishable from one another; and there is a collection of statements about these things, which are taken for granted. Starting with the assumed statements concerning these invented or imagined things, the mathematician discovers other statements, called theorems, and proves them as necessary consequences. This, in brief, is the pattern of mathematics. The mathematician is an artist whose medium is the mind and whose creations are ideas." (Hubert S Wall, "Creative Mathematics", 1963)
"The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)
"The notion of a fuzzy set provides a convenient point of departure for the construction of a conceptual framework which parallels in many respects the framework used in the case of ordinary sets, but is more general than the latter and, potentially, may prove to have a much wider scope of applicability, particularly in the fields of pattern classification and information processing. Essentially, such a framework provides a natural way of dealing with problems in which the source of imprecision is the absence of sharply denned criteria of class membership rather than the presence of random variables." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets", 1965)
"As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located in depth and have permanence." (Mary Douglas, "Purity and Danger", 1966)
"System theory is basically concerned with problems of relationships, of structure, and of interdependence rather than with the constant attributes of objects. In general approach it resembles field theory except that its dynamics deal with temporal as well as spatial patterns. Older formulations of system constructs dealt with the closed systems of the physical sciences, in which relatively self-contained structures could be treated successfully as if they were independent of external forces. But living systems, whether biological organisms or social organizations, are acutely dependent on their external environment and so must be conceived of as open systems." (Daniel Katz, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)
"[…] there is perhaps a difference between the ideas which are associated in the sense of their patterns being tired to the original one and available in connexion with it, and being actually associated or aroused. Our mental modelling of the outer world may imitate it and its sequences from moment to moment, but only that which is fairly frequent, or fits into other patterns, will remain for long, and of that only a portion will arise in response to other ideas. " (Kenneth J W Craik, "The Nature of Psychology", 1966)
"It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns - that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is." (Kenneth Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)
"The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos. […] This is the task of natural science: to show that the wonderful is not incomprehensible, to show how it can be comprehended - but not to destroy wonder. For when we have explained the wonderful, unmasked the hidden pattern, a new wonder arises at how complexity was woven out of simplicity. The aesthetics of natural science and mathematics is at one with the aesthetics of music and painting - both inhere in the discovery of a partially concealed pattern." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
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