Anthony Stafford Beer was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 theorist, consultant

Consultant

A consultant is a professional who provides professional or expert advice in a particular area such as management, accountancy, the environment, entertainment, technology, law , human resources, marketing, emergency management, food production, medicine, finance, life management, economics, public...

 and professor at the Manchester Business School

Manchester Business School

Manchester Business School is the largest department of the University of Manchester in Manchester, England. According to Bloomberg Business Week's ranking of the world's best business schools the MBS MBA is ranked third in the world...

. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

.
Beer was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. He started a degree in philosophy at University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

, but left in 1944 to join the army. He saw service in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 and stayed there until 1947. In 1949, he was demobilized, having reached the rank of captain.

He joined United Steel

United Steel Companies

The United Steel Companies were a steel making, engineering, coal mining and coal by-product group based in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.-History:...

 and persuaded the management to found an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed.