The Art of Modeling Dynamic Systems, Foster Morrison, Dover Reprint of a John Wiley book (1991, 2008)

Long ago, before Amazon.com there was a scientific book club modeled after the venerable Book of the Month Club - which I was surprised to find still exists.  The model was the same, you got four books for a dollar, and then you got a monthly magazine with reviews of other books, and you had to buy four more books at the regular price within a year or two to fulfill your membership agreement.  A selection was scheduled each month, which you got if you didn't remember to send in your postcard saying you didn't want the selection.  There were similar club for long-playing records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and DVDs, most (I actually thought all) are extinct by now.

I'm pretty sure that I got my original copy of this book because I didn't return the reply card, but its possible that I ordered it.  Either way, it is one of the best purchases that I ever made, and I would never have found it without the club, which I think was called the Library of Science, and astoundingly it still exists, I just checked, hence the link.  I guess that many of the old clubs have go online.  Anyway, in 1991 the World-Wide Web didn't exist, I had just got an e-mail account, and things like Gopher were just being developed.  Information was hard to find, and you learned about new books if they were reviewed and when they appeared in reference lists.

Morrison's book, which has the subtitle Forecasting for Chaos, Randomness, and Determinism, was an eye opener.  This is where I learned about modeling and forecasting and that it was possible to study dynamic systems without calculus (I admit it was many years before I realized that there were advantages to this approach.)  The Dover book has a couple of extra diagrams from Morrison's  papers at Federal Forecasters Conferences, and and some added references, but it largely unchanged.  So if you want to learn the basics of modeling and forecasting, this is a good place to start.  The book still doesn't make more than a passing reference the System Dynamics work in Jay Forrester's group at MIT, or the related work of Donella Meadows.  Both groups would have benefited from collaborations, if the system dynamics people had talked to the forecasters, the system dynamics groups would not have neglected to use resources in their models!  I will revisit some of the other work in this area over the next few months.