Norbert Wiener

Overview

Norbert Wiener was born on 26 November 1894 and died on 18 March 1964, while on a tour in Stockholm, Sweden ^[1]. He is widely considered the founder of cybernetics, the study of regulatory systems — systems that govern their own behaviour through loops of measurement and correction ^[2].

Education and early research

Wiener moved through formal schooling unusually fast. He received a BA in mathematics from Tufts College in 1909, an MA from Harvard University in 1912 and a PhD from Harvard in 1913 ^[1]. After the doctorate he remained at Harvard as a docent from 1915 to 1918 ^[1]. In 1918 and 1919 he served as a "computer" at Aberdeen Proving Ground ^[1]; at the time the word meant a person who carried out calculations rather than a machine.

At MIT

His long institutional home was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career at MIT in 1919 and was a professor there until 1960, after which he was Institute Professor Emeritus from 1960 to 1964 ^[1]. That is a single appointment spanning more than four decades, and it gave him an academic base for the mathematical and cross-disciplinary work described below.

Cybernetics

Wiener's exploration of information theory led him to conceive the idea of cybernetics ^[2]. He set the field out in *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine*, published in 1948 ^[3]. By his own account, cybernetics was a formalization of the notion of feedback, and he wrote that his anti-aircraft work led him to formulate it ^[3].

Feedback is easiest to grasp with a thermostat. The device measures the room's temperature, compares it with the setting, and switches the heater on or off according to the difference. The same three steps — measure, compare, correct — appear in a mechanical governor, in the nervous system, and in any system that holds a course against disturbance. Calling this a formalization means writing "correct according to the deviation" as a general, calculable description instead of describing the brass and levers of one particular device. Wiener's claim was that the pattern can be described in one vocabulary whether the regulating system is made of metal or of tissue; the title of the 1948 book states that ambition plainly, pairing control and communication, animal and machine.

Other books

Alongside cybernetics, Wiener published on mathematical analysis: *The Fourier Integral and Certain of its Applications* appeared in 1933 ^[3]. Fourier methods deal with the question of how a function can be broken down into components of different frequencies, a tool that turns up wherever signals are analysed. He also wrote for readers beyond his own specialty: *The Human Use of Human Beings* was published in 1950 ^[3].

Place in the record

The name of a discipline is attached to him: cybernetics, the study of regulatory systems, is credited to Wiener ^[2], and the 1948 book supplied the field with both its name and its frame — control and communication treated together, in organisms and in machines alike ^[3].