Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (1894 to 1964) was an American mathematician who spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a professor of mathematics. A child prodigy, he took a doctorate at Harvard at nineteen with a dissertation on mathematical logic. His research on stochastic processes and mathematical noise, including the study of Brownian motion that gave the Wiener process its name, fed directly into electronic engineering, communication theory and control systems. He is best remembered as the originator of cybernetics, the study of communication and control in animals and machines, which reached into computing, biology, neuroscience, philosophy and the organization of society. His ideas shaped John von Neumann, Claude Shannon and several anthropologists, and he was among the first to argue that intelligent behavior could arise from feedback mechanisms that machines might simulate, an early step toward artificial intelligence.