Patrick M. Gunkel (1947 – 2017) was an American futurist and independent scholar best known as the originator of "ideonomy", a combinatorial "science of ideas". Although he never completed a degree, his career included positions at the

Hudson Institute The Hudson Institute is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporat ...

, MIT, and the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. Guido Enthoven describes Gunkel's ideonomy as one of three pioneering attempts to create a science of ideas (the others being Antoine Destutt de Tracy's original notion of

ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied pri ...

and Genrich Altshuller’s TRIZ "system of inventive problem solving"), while

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, an ...

described ideonomy as "perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas". An archive of his works was assembled by Whitman Richards.

References

1947 births 2017 deaths American futurologists Independent scholars American innovators {{US-bio-stub