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Created page with "===Biography=== Norbert Wiener (26 November 1894 – 18 March 1964) was an American mathematician and the founder of cybernetics. A child prodigy — he entered Tufts at eleven and took his Harvard doctorate in mathematical logic at eighteen — he studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and David Hilbert at Göttingen, and spent his career at MIT from 1919. His pure mathematics is substantial in its own right: the Wiener process in the theory of Bro..."

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===Biography===
Norbert Wiener (26 November 1894 – 18 March 1964) was an American mathematician and the founder of cybernetics. A child prodigy — he entered Tufts at eleven and took his Harvard doctorate in mathematical logic at eighteen — he studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and David Hilbert at Göttingen, and spent his career at MIT from 1919.

His pure mathematics is substantial in its own right: the Wiener process in the theory of Brownian motion, Wiener–Hopf equations, generalised harmonic analysis, and the Wiener filter.

===Cybernetics===
The field arose from war work. Wiener spent the early 1940s on the problem of anti-aircraft fire control — predicting the future position of an evading aircraft — and found that the essential problem was neither mechanical nor human but ''informational'': a loop in which measurement, prediction, action and correction circulate. Generalising this, he defined cybernetics in the subtitle of his 1948 book as "control and communication in the animal and the machine."<ref>Wiener, Norbert. ''Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948; 2nd ed. 1961.</ref> The word is from the Greek ''kybernētēs'', steersman — the same root as "governor," which is also the name of the mechanical feedback device that regulates a steam engine.

The claim that made cybernetics important was one of equivalence. Purposive behaviour — a cat catching a mouse, a gun tracking a plane, a body maintaining its temperature, a firm hitting a target — has the same formal structure regardless of substrate. That structure is negative feedback: output is measured, compared against a goal, and the difference is used to modify subsequent action.

===Key Ideas===
* '''Feedback and circular causality.''' The break with linear cause-and-effect that made goal-directed behaviour describable without appeal to purpose as a mysterious property.
* '''Information as a quantity distinct from energy.''' Wiener's framing of information in terms of entropy, developed alongside Claude Shannon's.
* '''Homeostasis across substrates.''' The bridge between physiology, engineering and social organisation on which [[Ross Ashby]], [[Stafford Beer]] and much else was built.
* '''The Macy Conferences.''' Wiener was central to the interdisciplinary meetings (1946–53) that spread cybernetic thinking into anthropology, psychiatry and the social sciences, bringing in Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch and others.

===The Human Use of Human Beings===
Wiener's 1950 book is the ethical companion, and it is unusually direct for a founder writing about his own field. He argued that automation would displace labour on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution and warned against a society that treated people as components; he refused military funding after the war and declined to work on projects he judged dangerous, publishing "A Scientist Rebels" in 1947 to say so. His late essay on the moral hazards of automation includes an early and precise statement of what would later be called the alignment problem: a machine given a goal will pursue exactly the goal it was given.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Cybernetics is the intellectual foundation on which the cyborg concept rests: without the claim that organisms and machines can be described by the same regulatory formalism, "cybernetic organism" is not a coherent idea. Wiener also set the field's ethical tone — the assumption that someone who builds a control system is responsible for what it controls.

===Related Reading===
* [[Cybernetics]]
* [[Ross Ashby]]
* [[Stafford Beer]]
* [[Cyborg]]
* [[Manfred Clynes]]
* [[How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Computing History]]
[[Category:Cybernetics]]

Norbert Wiener - Revision history