John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law. Biography Gall started his studies in St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He received further medical training at George Washington University Medical School in Washington, and Yale College. Eventually early 1960s he took his pediatric training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In the 1960s Gall started as a practicing pediatrician in Ann Arbor, Michigan and became part of the faculty of the University of Michigan. In 2001 he retired after more than forty years of private practice. In the first decades of his practice he had also "conducted weekly seminars in Parenting Strategies for parents, prospective parents, medical students, nursing students, and other health care practitioners." Until 2001 he held the position of Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan. Beginning in 1958 he was a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. After he retired, Gall and his wife Carol A. Gall moved to Walker, Minnesota, where he continued writing and published seven more titles. He died in December 2014. Work Gall's main research interest was the behavioral and developmental problems of children, on which subject he published several scientific papers and some books. As a sideline he conducted more general research on the question, what makes systems work and fail. He collected and analyzed all kinds of examples of systems-failures, and generalized problems and pitfalls into a series of "Laws of Systems". In 2002 Gall also published a historical novel on Hatshepsut, queen of ancient Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty. This interest arose from a trip John Gall had made to Egypt in 1969. Systemantics In 1975 he published his systems research under the title General systemantics, republished two years later as Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail by Quadrangle, The New York Times Book Company. This work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hebrew, and Japanese. In 1986 the second edition was published with the title Systemantics: The Underground Text of Systems Lore., which was almost twice the size of the first edition. In 2002 he published a third edition under the title The Systems