Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who founded the field of cybernetics, the study of communication and control in machines, animals and organizations, publishing the foundational book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. Wiener's central insight was that feedback, the use of information about a system's own output to adjust its future behavior, is a unifying concept that applies equally to mechanical devices such as thermostats and guided anti-aircraft systems, to biological processes within living organisms, and to organizations and social systems, and that studying these feedback processes mathematically could reveal common underlying principles across all of them. His wartime research on the mathematics of predicting the future position of a moving target for anti-aircraft gun control led directly to his later, broader theory of feedback and control. Wiener's cybernetics had a substantial influence on the early development of computer science, robotics, control theory and information theory, shaping how researchers thought about the relationship between computation, communication and self-regulating systems well before those fields fully separated into their modern forms.