General Introduction

“There is a fairly wide gap between what might be regarded as ‘animate’ system theorists and ‘inanimate’ system theorists at the present time, and it is not at all certain that this gap will be narrowed, much less closed, in the near future. There are some who feel that this gap reflects the fundamental inadequacy of conventional mathematics -the mathematics of precisely- defined points, functions, sets, probability measures, etc.- for coping with the analysis of biological systems, and that to deal effectively with such systems, which are generally orders of magnitude more complex than man-made systems, we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions. Indeed, the need for such mathematics is becoming increasingly apparent even in the realm of inanimate systems, for in most practical cases the a priori data as well as the criteria by which the performance of a man-made system are judged are far from being precisely specified or having accurately-known probability distributions”.