Remembering William Goffman: Mathematical information science pioneer

Mathematical Approaches to Modeling Science from an Algorithmic-Historiography Perspective

“…The R-group has lost interest and the S-group forms the reservoir for further growth. Unlike Lotka's law, for which only one key publication can be found, Goffman published work about this model over the course of several years, and also with different coauthors (Harmon 2008). For our analysis, we identified two main publications that still gain sufficient recognition.…”

Modeling the Structure and Dynamics of Science Using Books

“…The first three award recipients were Derek de Solla Price (1981), Robert K. , and Thomas S. Kuhn and their books Little Science, Big Science (Price, 1963), The Sociology of Science The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962) are included in this analysis.Predictive models of science (computational and mathematical) are developed in scientometrics, bibliometrics, system dynamics, physics and mathematics, but also more recently in a new branch of philosophy of science and cognition (Payette, 2012). One of the first predictive models was introduced by Goffman-he used a model originally developed to predict the spread of diseases to describe the spreading of ideas (Goffman & Nevill 1964;Goffman 1966;Harmon 2008). The so-called SIR model orders researchers in three categories: the number researchers 'susceptible' to a new idea but not yet infected with it (S), the number of 'infected' researchers (I), and the number of 'recovered' researchers (R) who lost interest and will not return to the idea.…”