Prelims

Half Title

George Spencer Brown’s “Design with the NOR”

Title Page

George Spencer Brown’s “Design with the NOR”: With Related Essays

Edited by

Prof Steffen Roth

La Rochelle Business School, France

University of Turku, Finland

Prof Markus Heidingsfelder

Xiamen University Malaysia, Malaysia

Mr Lars Clausen

UCL University College, Denmark

University of Flensburg, Germany

Dr Klaus Brønd Laursen

University of Aarhus, Denmark

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83982-611-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-610-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-612-2 (Epub)

Contents

About the Contributors

Mohammad Arif Sobhan Bhuiyan was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh in 1985. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Applied Physics, Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, in 2006 and 2007, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia in 2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Xiamen University Malaysia, Malaysia. His research interest is in the field of RF & Wireless Communication and low power IoT devices.

George Spencer Brown (1923–2016) engaged in multiple disciplines throughout his life. His first publication was a proposed doctoral thesis: Probability and Scientific Inference (1957). In 1969, his book “Laws of Form” was published for the first time and it has never been out of print since. It has been amended with numerous prefaces and appendices throughout the course of his lifetime. Later publications were sometimes published under the pseudonym James Keys. He had multiple connections to universities and business endeavors in the UK and overseas during his lifetime. His work on the foundations of philosophy and mathematics has inspired generations of thinkers across disciplines from the social sciences, physics, engineering, biology, and philosophy.

Lars Clausen is a Doctoral Candidate at Europa – University of Flensburg, Germany and Lecturer at the UCL University College, Denmark. He graduated from Aarhus University in Denmark in sociology. His research includes the history of design patterns in theory structures, the functions of diabolical communication, and applied interdisciplinary research.

Albrecht Fritzsche is Acting Chair of Technology and Process Management at Ulm University. He is also a Senior Lecturer at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. He holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from TU Darmstadt and another one in industrial management from Hohenheim University, Stuttgart. His research interests include design theory, innovation management, open laboratories, and service engineering.

Markus Heidingsfelder is the author of System Pop (2012) and Trump - beobachtet (Observing Trump, 2020). He was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1963, received his Ph.D. from the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in 2009, held appointments at DJS Munich, HCU Hamburg, FU Berlin, LMU Munich, Habib University (Pakistan), and is now an assistant professor in the Journalism Department of Xiamen University Malaysia.

Franz Hoegl studied communication design at TH Nuremberg. After graduating, he worked as a Freelance Designer and Illustrator; since 2011, he is the Creative Director of the Denkmalneu Gruppe. In the context of his work as a Designer, he also conducted intensive studies in the fields of philosophy of language and semiotics. After meeting the sociologist Peter Fuchs, from whom he learned about systems theory, he has since been publishing on topics such as the history of logic, communication, and language from a systems theory perspective. He is also a Passionate Banjo Player in the alternative country trio “The Sandbox Josephs.”

Klaus Brønd Laursen is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in management at the Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include the economy of morality, temporality, and market studies.

Kelvin J. A. Ooi received his B. Eng. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM), affiliated to the Department of New Energy Science and Engineering, and the Department of Physics. Prior to joining XMUM, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, from 2013 to 2018, in the SUTD-MIT International Design Center, and also the Lee Kuan Yew Center for Innovative Cities, at Singapore University Technology and Design.

Steffen Roth is a Professor of Management at the La Rochelle Business School, France, and an Adjunct Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include management and organization theory as well as the digital transformation of social theory.

Divyamaan Sahoo was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, India in 1995. He received his B.A. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 2017, majoring in Mathematics, Philosophy, and Music Composition, and recently received his M.F.A. in Studio: Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, in 2020. He is currently working as an Independent Researcher with Louis H. Kauffman and James M. Flagg in reviewing Appendix 9 of the revised Sixth English edition of George Spencer-Brown’s “Laws of Form” (2015, Bohmeier Verlag, Germany).

Peter Zeiner studied Physics at TU Vienna. He received his Ph.D. from TU Vienna in 1998. After some years as postdoc in Vienna and at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands, he spent many years at Bielefeld University, where he got his habilitation in Mathematics in 2015. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Xiamen University Malaysia. His research interests include discrete mathematics, algebraic number theory, and mathematical crystallography.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Perfectly continent is our gratitude to George Spencer Brown for generously providing us with the NOR typescript (after passing some mathematical tests), and we are equally grateful to Johanna Bohmeier for her invaluable support and constant advice as well as to Thomas Wolf, who kindly granted us the right to print the typescript. We further extend our gratitude to Spencer Brown’s estate, Graham Ellsbury, for his unreserved and ceaseless encouragement.

Special thanks go to Mirko Ludewig for his apt photographs of the late Spencer Brown and for his indulgence with the sometimes quite cruel insults of the portrayed, who obviously was uncomfortable and insecure in front of a camera.

This book owes much to the stimulating environment of the Inter-University Center Dubrovnik, which has been housing the Luhmann Conference series for many years, and to the tireless helpfulness and hospitality of its core management team Nada Bruer Ljubišić, Nikolina Vekić, and Tomislav Kvesić, whose support added greatly to the success of our June 2019 book development workshop “NOR. Reverse engineering the Laws of Form.”

We would also like to thank all participants of the 2020 edition of the “formlabor” at the Code University Berlin – and particularly Dirk Baecker, Florian Grote, Fritz B. Simon, Hergen Wöbken, and Sven Kosub – for two days of mind-expanding communication and other forms of feedback on earlier versions of some of the contributions to the present volume.

Last but not least, we are grateful to Louis Kauffman for his unceasing commitment to the mathematical appreciation of the work of Spencer Brown as well as for stimulating conversations about the spiritual meaning of his formalism (including the continual awareness of the background or the nothingness out of which all things arise).

*****