Ludwig was born near Vienna on September 19, 1901. In 1918, he went to the University of Innsbruck, and later transferred to the University of Vienna, where he studied the history of art, philosophy, and biology. He received his doctorate in 1926, with a PhD dissertation on Gustav Fechner.

In 1928, he published Modern Theories of Development, where he introduced the question of whether we could explain biology in purely physical terms.  He suggested we could, if we see living things as endowed with self-organizational dynamics.

In 1937, he went to the University of Chicago, where he gave his first lecture on General Systems Theory, which he saw as a methodology for all sciences.  In 1939, he became a professor at the University of Vienna and continued his research on the comparative physiology of growth.  He summarized his work in Problems of Life, published in 1940.

In 1949, he emigrated to Canada, where he began research on cancer.  Soon, he branched into cognitive psychology, where he introduced a holistic epistemology that he contrasted with behaviorism.

In 1960, he became professor of theoretical biology in the department of zoology and psychology at the University of Alberta.  In 1967, he wrote Robots, Men, and Minds, and in 1968, he wrote General Systems Theory.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy died of a heart attack on June 12, 1972.

Once upon a time, it was possible for one bright individual -- say an Aristotle or a da Vinci -- to know everything that his or her culture had to offer.  We still sometimes refer to people who have a particularly broad knowledge base as a renaissance man or woman.  But this isn't really possible anymore, because there is simply too much information in the world.  Everyone winds up a specialist.  That isn't, of course, entirely bad; but it does mean that the various sciences (and arts and humanities as well) tend to become isolated.  A new idea in one field stays in that field, even when it might mean a revolution for another field.  The last time we saw a truly significant transfer of ideas from one science to others was when Darwin introduced the theory of evolution!

General Systems Theory was a proposal for a mathematical and logical means of expressing ideas in what we nowadays comfortably call systems.  Bertalanffy believed that this was the way we could unify the sciences, including biology, history, sociology, and even psychology, and open the door to a new kind of scientist who is a generalist rather than a specialist.  These generalists, by making use of these common systems models, would be able to transfer insights from one field to another.

Bertalanffy took concepts from cybernetics, information theory, game theory, decision theory, topology, factor analysis, systems engineering, operations research, and human engineering, and perfected the "flow diagram" idea that we all take for granted today.  His most significant innovation, however, was the idea of the open system -- a system in the context of a larger system.  This allowed systems theory to be applied to animals within ecosystems, for example, or to people withing their socio-cultural contexts.  In particular, the idea of the open system gave the age-old metaphor of societies-as-organisms scientific legitimacy and a new lease-on-life.