Citation
Vallée, R. (1998), "Rafael Rodríguez Delgado: 1912-1997", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727baf.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited
Rafael Rodríguez Delgado: 1912-1997
Obituary Rafael Rodríguez Delgado: 1912-1997Dr Rafael Rodríguez Delgado, Director of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) for external affairs, died a few months ago. He was born in Madrid, in 1912.
After studying law at the University of Salamanca, he obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Madrid in 1935. From 1951 to 1956 he lived in Caracas where he was Director of Revista Venezolana de Síntesis. Having obtained a research grant, he spent a year at the University of Yale (1956-1957). Then, from 1958 to 1968, he was an international official of the United Nations. From 1969 to 1972 Dr Rafael Delgado held the position of Director of the Centro Latino-americano de Documentacíon Economíca y Social and became, in 1978, Professor at the Instituto de Administración Pública de España.
He was deeply interested in systems theory and its applications. In 1980 he founded the Sociedad Española de Sistemas Generales (affiliated to WOSC) and was its first president. He later became editor of the Revista Internacional de Sistemas and vice-president of the Union Européenne de Systémique.
Apart from more than one hundred articles on systems, development, philosophy of sciences, he was also co-editor of International Systems Handbook (Systemic Publications, Madrid, 1993) and author of Teoría de Sistemas y Gestión de las Organisaciones (Instituto Andino de Sistemas, Lima) and of Del Universo al Ser Humano, a title which may be translated by "From Universe to Human Being", (Series McGraw-Hill de Divulgación Científica, 1997). In Teoria de Sistemas y Gestion de las Organisaciones, Rafael Delgado uses systems concepts, quotes Jacques Mélèse (modular analysis), Stafford Beer (viable systems) and gives his own views. Del Universo al Ser Humano gives Rafael Delgado the opportunity to present general concepts having to do with matter, energy, information, entropy, etc., and to proceed then to cybernetics, systems and human society of the coming century.
Robert Vallée