Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), American mathematician and founder of cybernetics, the study of control and communication in machines, animals, and organizations. Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, and educated at Tufts College and at Cornell, Harvard, Cambridge, Göttingen, and Columbia universities. A mathematical prodigy, he became assistant professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1919 and was professor from 1932 to 1960.

Wiener specialized in mathematics and mathematical physics. During World War II (1939-1945), while engaged in research on antiaircraft-defense techniques, he attempted to produce a mathematical and electronic system for communicating vital information. Through this work, he became interested in automatic computing and feedback theory. He thus founded the science of cybernetics, which deals not only with the automatic control of machinery by computers and other electronic devices, but also the study of the human brain and nervous system and the relationship between the two communication and control systems. Wiener summarized his theories in Cybernetics (1948), and also wrote The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Nonlinear Problems of Random Theory (1958), The Tempter (1959), and God and Golem, Inc. (1964).