Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, born in 1894 and died in 1964, who is remembered as the founder of cybernetics. A child prodigy who earned his doctorate young, he made important contributions to probability theory, signal processing, and the mathematics of feedback control, much of it sharpened by his work on fire control systems during the Second World War.
His best known work is the 1948 book “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” published by the M.I.T. Press, in which he coined the term cybernetics and argued that the same principles of feedback and control govern both engineered systems and living organisms. The book unexpectedly reached a broad audience and helped launch an interdisciplinary movement spanning engineering, biology, and the social sciences.
Wiener also thought hard about the social consequences of automation, which he set out for general readers in “The Human Use of Human Beings.” His emphasis on feedback, communication, and goal directed behavior shaped the intellectual environment in which artificial intelligence and neural network research were born, and ran alongside the early work of figures such as McCulloch and Pitts. The primary source used here is the Internet Archive scan of his 1948 book Cybernetics.