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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fuzziness And Catastrophe, Martin Zwick, Daniel Guy Schwartz, George G. Lendaris
Fuzziness And Catastrophe, Martin Zwick, Daniel Guy Schwartz, George G. Lendaris
Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
In a recent short note, Flondor has alluded to a possible linkage of fuzzy set theory and catastrophe theory. We consider several features of catastrophe theory, namely the properties of discontinuous jumps, hysteresis, and divergence in the "cusp catastrophe," and the role of the bias factor in the "butterfly catastrophe," which have affinities to and suggest possible extensions of fuzzy set ideas. Certain functions extensively considered in catastrophe theory lend themselves in some cases to interpretation as membership functions. The use of such functions may be of interest for the characterization of linguistic descriptions which are time-varying and encompass both …
Requisite Variety And The Second Law, Martin Zwick
Requisite Variety And The Second Law, Martin Zwick
Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
Although the Law of Requisite Variety (LRV) speaks directly about entropy (of a set of disturbances to a system, and of the states and effects of a regulator), the relation of Ashby's principle to the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not appear to have been commented on, In this paper, it is shown that, when regulation is viewed as a temporal process, the LRV can be interpreted as a statement of, and, in fact, a consequence of, the Second Law. In essence, the regulator reduces the variety (entropy) of the system being regulated by a compensatory increase of variety (entropy) …
Dialectics And Catastrophe, Martin Zwick
Dialectics And Catastrophe, Martin Zwick
Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
The three classical principles of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, (1) the transformation of quantity into quality, (2) the unity and struggle of opposites, and (3) the negation of negation, can be modeled with the Catastrophe Theory of Renép Thorn and E. C. Zeeman, especially with the ‘elementary catastrophes’ known as the cusp and the butterfly.