Talks & media

Short — for programs and introductions

Richard Smith, Ph.D., is a systems scientist, mathematician, and philosopher. He took his doctorate under George Klir on the quantification of uncertainty, is Executive Chairman of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, and spent two decades building financial technology used by tens of thousands of investors. His current work argues that the turning geometry behind cycles is the structure measurement itself keeps disclosing.

Full

One question has organized Richard Smith's working life: how do we act well under uncertainty — and what must the world be like for that question to have an answer? His doctorate, under systems-science founder George Klir, gave the question its mathematics: how much of a system can be known, and what necessarily stays hidden. The markets gave it its hardest test — two decades of financial technology, beginning with TradeStops, which has helped tens of thousands of self-directed investors manage billions of dollars. The Foundation for the Study of Cycles, founded in 1941, gives it an institution: as Executive Chairman he works to advance the empirical study of cycles across markets, nature, and society with the rigor the field's critics have rightly demanded. And his current research gives it an answer in progress: that the turning geometry behind cycle phenomena — rotation, phase, projection — is also the right lens on measurement itself, classical and quantum. The first public document of that program is the essay "Meaning and Measurement." He is a contributing author to Wolfgang Smith for Everyone(Angelico Press, 2026) and formerly served as President of the Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation.