Professor John L. Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California in 1970.

He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, NYU and Princeton before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria.

In 2000 he formed two companies in Santa Fe and London, Qforma, Inc. and SimWorld, Ltd, devoted to the employment of tools and concepts from modern system theory for the solution of problems in business and finance.

American complexity scientist and systems theorist John Casti, is cofounder of The X-Center Vienna, a research institute focusing on human-caused extreme events and how to anticipate them.

Casti has published nearly twenty volumes of academic and popular science and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Southern California. He lives in Vienna, Austria.