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Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (26 November 1894 – 18 March 1964) was an American mathematician who founded cybernetics as a formal discipline. A child prodigy who earned his PhD from Harvard at eighteen, Wiener made contributions to harmonic analysis, stochastic processes, and information theory before synthesizing his wartime work on anti-aircraft fire control into a general theory of communication and control in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948).

Core ideas

  • Feedback and control: the same formal principles — negative feedback, circular causality, error correction — govern the operation of servomechanisms, nervous systems, and social institutions. The steersman adjusting a ship’s rudder and the thermostat adjusting a furnace are instances of the same abstract process.
  • Information as the basis of order: Wiener treated information as a fundamental physical quantity, distinct from matter and energy, whose processing, transmission, and degradation (entropy) explain how systems maintain organization.
  • The human use of human beings: Wiener was early and vocal about the social implications of automation, arguing in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) that cybernetic machines would transform labor, politics, and social organization — and that without ethical governance, automation would concentrate power and destroy livelihoods.

Notable works

  • Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
  • The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950)
  • Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series (1949)

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Date created

Cite

@misc{emsenn2026-norbert-wiener,
  author    = {emsenn},
  title     = {Norbert Wiener},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://emsenn.net/library/general/domains/people/norbert-wiener/},
  publisher = {emsenn.net},
  license   = {CC BY-SA 4.0}
}