10 Facts About Marian Mazur

Marian Mazur was a Polish scientist who specialized in electrothermics and cybernetics, and the founding father of the Polish school of cybernetics.

In 1937 Mazur pioneered work on automatic telephone switchboards, and developed a working prototype just before World War II.

Marian Mazur attained professorship in 1954 and later worked on standardizing terminology related to electrical engineering and wrote numerous of articles and a book on the subject.

Marian Mazur was a member of numerous Polish and international scientific organizations, including the 27th Studies Committee of Thermoelectrics of the International Electrotechnical Commission of which he was president.

In 1977 Marian Mazur acted as a consultant in the field of artificial intelligence at Rice University in Houston, USA.

Marian Mazur became interested in subjects related to control theory and what would later be called cybernetics during World War II.

Marian Mazur started developing the theory of autonomous systems in 1942, but the destruction of the original manuscript in which he described his theory in the Warsaw Uprising and postwar events delayed the publication of his Cybernetyczna teoria systemow autonomicznych until 1966.

Marian Mazur defined an autonomous system as a system capable of controlling its own actions and of acting to prevent the loss of this capability, such as a living organism.

Marian Mazur introduced a terminology sufficiently general to describe all such systems and their interactions with their environment.

Marian Mazur's theory of autonomous systems included a formula that described the reactivity of a culture as a ratio of internal reaction to external stimulus where "the value of reactivity is a function of the system's power to transform stimuli into reactions".