60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress 

The Anatol Rapoport Memorial Award is offered in recognition of the best student paper presented at the annual ISSS Conference in a quantitative, engineering, hard science, natural science, tehcnological, or logico-empirical systems framework. Submissions that present any one or combination of these perspectives will be eligible for this award.  

As such, it is distinct from the Sir Geoffrey Vickers Award which, as described above, is offered in recognition of work presented in a qualitative, humanistic, social science, artistic, phenomenological, or spiritual-intuitive systems framework (again, any one or combination of these).  

This award honors the contributions of one of the original founders of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, the original precursor of which the ISSS is a direct decendent.(1)  Rapoport joined his skills in mathematics and formal logic with those of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, economist Kenneth E. Boulding, and psychologist, Ralph W. Gerard to establish the aims of the original Society in 1954 in support of what came to be known as the Systems Movement.  These aims included the idea that, as a result of work across different disciplines of knowledge, there would arise a high-level meta-theory of systems that could be mathematically expressed.  

His vision focused on what he characterized as "the creative exploration of analogies,"(2) especially those deducible from mathematical models.  Such efforts served to illustrate his conviction of the fundamental interconnectedness of everything to everything else, as he expressed so eloquently in his keynote address to the ISSS/World Congress of the System Sciences in 2000.  On that occassion, he pointed out that the symbol for the Society was the integration symbol from mathematics — the ∫ sign — and that exploration of mathematical analogies or "isomorphisms" is the main interest of a general system-theory.  

The ISSS Rapoport Award seeks to recognize promising work in the systems sciences in this spirit of inquiry.

(1) Checkland, P. (1993) Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England, p. 93.

(2) Hammond, D. (2003) The Science of Synthesis, University Presss of Colorado, Boulder CO, USA, p. 157.