Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician and philosopher celebrated as the father of cybernetics and feedback loop control theory. An astonishing child prodigy homeschooled by his father Leo Wiener (a Harvard professor of Slavic languages), Norbert entered Tufts College at age eleven, graduated at fourteen, and earned his doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard at eighteen before studying under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.

Joining the faculty at MIT, Wiener made foundational mathematical breakthroughs in stochastic processes (the Wiener process modeling Brownian motion) and harmonic analysis. During World War II, working on automated anti-aircraft fire-control radar predictors, Wiener realized that biological organisms and electromechanical machines share identical principles of steering and goal-directed control based on negative feedback. In 1948, he published his epochal book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, coining the term cybernetics from the Greek for 'steersman' and laying the groundwork for robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computer networks.