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Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 - March 18, 1964) was an
American mathematician, known as the founder of cybernetics. He
created the term in his book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press,
1948).
Norbert Wiener
He was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo
and Bertha Wiener. Leo was an Instructor in Slavic Languages at Harvard. Norbert was
educated at home until he was seven, he entered school only briefly before resuming the majority of his studies at home. In 1903
he returned to school, graduating from Ayer High School in 1906.
In September 1906, aged eleven, he entered Tufts College to study
mathematics. He received his degree from Tufts in 1909 and entered Harvard. At Harvard he studied zoology but in 1910 he
transferred to Cornell to begin graduate studies in philosophy,
he then returned to Harvard the next year to continue his philosophy studies. Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 for
a dissertation on mathematical logic.
From Harvard he went to Cambridge, England and studied
under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy. In 1914 he studied at Göttingen, Germany under David Hilbert and
Edmund Landau. He then returned to Cambridge and then back to the USA. In
1915-16 he taught philosophy courses at Harvard, worked for General
Electric and then Encyclopedia Americana before
working on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He remained in Maryland until the end of the war, when he took
up a post as instructor in mathematics at MIT. (after being rejected for a position at the
University of Melbourne)
While working at MIT he frequently travelled to Europe. In 1926 he married Margaret Engemann and then returned to Europe as a
Guggenheim scholar.
He spent most of his time at Göttingen or with Hardy at Cambridge. He worked on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral,
Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems among other problems. He won the Bocher Prize in 1933.
During World War II he worked on gunnery control which encouraged him to
synthesize his interests in communication theory into
cybernetics. He died in 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Published works include The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Ex-Prodigy (1953), I am a
Mathematician (1956), Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958), and God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on
Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964).
External link
Biographical sketch of Norbert Wiener
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