Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was an American mathematician and child prodigy whose work shaped harmonic analysis, probability, anti-aircraft prediction, communication theory, and the study of feedback systems. Educated at Tufts, Harvard, Cambridge, and Gottingen, he taught for decades at MIT. His wartime research led him to a broad theory of control and communication in animals and machines.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
