Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was born in 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, the son of Leo Wiener, a scholar of Slavic languages who taught at Harvard and educated his son at home with great intensity. A child prodigy, Norbert entered Tufts College at eleven, graduated in mathematics at fourteen, and received a doctorate from Harvard at eighteen with a thesis on mathematical logic. He then studied in Cambridge with Bertrand Russell and in Göttingen with David Hilbert. In 1919 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for the rest of his career. He made important contributions to the mathematics of random motion, now called the Wiener process, and to signal processing. During the Second World War he worked on the automatic aiming of anti-aircraft guns, which led him to study how machines and living things use feedback to control themselves. In Cybernetics (1948) he named and founded this new field, which influenced computing, robotics, biology and the social sciences. He later warned about the social effects of automation in The Human Use of Human Beings. He died in Stockholm in 1964.

Norbert Wiener is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born into a Jewish family; his personal beliefs are not well documented. Source: Wikipedia