Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964)

US mathematician, credited with the establishment of the science of cybernetics in his book Cybernetics (1948). In mathematics, he laid the foundation of the study of stochastic processes (those dependent on random events), particularly Brownian motion.

Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, and received his PhD from Harvard at the age of 19. He then went to Europe to study under leading mathematicians (Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, England, and David Hilbert at Göttingen, Germany). From 1919 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming professor in 1932. He devoted much of his efforts to methodology, developing mathematical approaches that could usefully be applied to continuously changing processes.

During World War II, Wiener worked on the control of anti-aircraft guns (which required him to consider factors such as the machinery itself, the gunner, and the unpredictable evasive action on the part of the target's pilot), on filtering ‘noise’ from useful information for radar, and on coding and decoding. His investigations stimulated his interest in information transfer and processes such as information feedback.