---
alias:
- Norbert Wiener
born: 1894-11-26
category: Scientists & Researchers
created: 2026-06-20
died: 1964-03-18
location: Columbia, Missouri; Cambridge, Massachusetts
summary: Norbert Wiener was the American mathematician who founded cybernetics, the
  science of control and communication in the animal and the machine, building on
  his wartime work on automatic gun-aiming, and who warned that the automation it
  enabled could dehumanize labor.
tags:
- Person
- NorbertWiener
- Cybernetics
- Mathematics
- Automation
- MIT
updated: 2026-06-20
---

Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 to March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher who founded [cybernetics](/concepts/cybernetics/), the study of control and communication in living organisms and machines, which he named in his 1948 book of that title. A child prodigy who took a Harvard doctorate at eighteen, he spent his career at the [Massachusetts Institute of Technology](/organizations/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/), where he did foundational work in probability, harmonic analysis, and the mathematics of prediction, and where his World War II research on automatic anti-aircraft fire control led him to the feedback principle at the heart of cybernetics. He was also an early and insistent moral critic of his own field, warning that automatic machinery could throw people out of work and reduce human beings to servants of the machines they built.[^1][^2]

### The Prodigy and the Mathematician

Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the son of Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor of Slavic languages who subjected the boy to an intense and demanding home education. He entered Tufts College at eleven, graduated at fourteen, and took a doctorate from Harvard at eighteen in 1913 with a dissertation on mathematical logic, after which a traveling fellowship took him to Cambridge to study under Bertrand Russell and to Gottingen to work with David Hilbert. He joined the mathematics department at MIT in 1919 and remained there for the rest of his career, recounting his unusual upbringing in two memoirs, *Ex-Prodigy* (1953) and *I Am a Mathematician* (1956).[^1][^3]

His pure mathematics was substantial and influential. In the 1920s he constructed a rigorous mathematical model of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles, now called the Wiener process and a foundation of modern probability theory and stochastic calculus, and he did major work in harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems. During and after the war he developed the theory of optimal filtering of signals from noise, the Wiener filter, which along with related work by the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov became a standard tool in signal processing and control engineering.[^2][^3]

### The Anti-Aircraft Predictor

When the United States entered World War II, Wiener turned to the problem of aiming anti-aircraft guns at fast, evasive aircraft, work funded from 1940 through the National Defense Research Committee. The difficulty was that a shell took many seconds to reach altitude, so the gun had to be aimed not where the plane was but where it would be, which required predicting the future path of a pilot who was actively trying not to be predictable. With the engineer Julian Bigelow, Wiener treated the pilot-and-plane as a single system whose future position could be estimated statistically from its past track, and built an electromechanical predictor to compute the lead automatically.[^4][^5]

The predictor was never deployed, but the conceptual yield was decisive. Wiener and Bigelow found that a system correcting its aim from feedback could, if the feedback were excessive, fall into wild oscillation resembling a human movement disorder, which prompted Wiener to consult the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth about feedback and purpose in the nervous system. Their 1943 paper "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," written with Rosenblueth and Bigelow, argued that purposeful behavior in animals and in machines alike could be understood as feedback-controlled action, collapsing the supposed distinction between the goal-seeking of organisms and of servomechanisms.[^4][^5]

### Coining Cybernetics

Wiener gathered these ideas into *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine* (1948), coining the term from the Greek kybernetes, meaning steersman or governor, the same root that gives "governor" in both the political and the mechanical sense. The book proposed that control, feedback, communication, and the statistical concept of information were a common language for phenomena in engineering, biology, and society, and despite its technical mathematics it became an unexpected popular success. The framework developed in close exchange with the interdisciplinary Macy Conferences on circular causal and feedback mechanisms, held in New York from 1946 to 1953, where Wiener, [John von Neumann](/people/john-von-neumann/), Claude Shannon, the anthropologists [Margaret Mead](/people/margaret-mead/) and [Gregory Bateson](/people/gregory-bateson/), and the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch worked to extend the feedback idea across the sciences.[^2][^6]

Cybernetics gave a generation of researchers a vocabulary of feedback loops, homeostasis, and information, and it shaped fields from control theory and computing to ecology, management, and the social sciences. Wiener himself drew a sharp line between his interest in the existing analogy between machines and nervous systems and any claim that machines would soon equal human beings; his concern was less with building artificial minds than with understanding control and communication as such, and with their human consequences.[^2][^6]

### The Human Use of Human Beings

In *The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society* (1950) Wiener translated the technical argument into a broad reflection on what automatic machinery would do to human society. He predicted that the automatic factory and the feedback-controlled machine would replace not only manual labor but routine clerical and decision-making work, and he warned that this "second industrial revolution" could produce unemployment and social dislocation on a scale that would make the Depression "seem a pleasant joke" if it were left to the unregulated market. He framed the danger in moral terms, arguing that to use a human being as a mere cog, valuing only the physical or routine mental work that a machine could also do, was to degrade and waste that human being.[^7][^8]

Wiener pressed the point in practice as well as in print. In 1949 he wrote to Walter Reuther, the head of the United Automobile Workers, to warn that automatic control of machinery was coming and to offer his help to organized labor in preparing for it, fearing that the technology would otherwise be used purely to cut labor costs. He returned to the relationship between cybernetics, creation, and responsibility in his last book, *God and Golem, Inc.* (1964), a meditation on machines that learn and reproduce, published shortly after his death and awarded the National Book Award.[^7][^9]

### The Refusal of Secrecy

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wiener became one of the most outspoken scientists of his generation on the ethics of research. In January 1947 the *Atlantic Monthly* published his open letter "A Scientist Rebels," in which he refused a researcher's request for a copy of his wartime work because it might be applied to weapons, declaring that he would not "publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists" and that a scientist was not obliged to serve ends he found morally abhorrent. He withdrew from classified and military-funded research and urged colleagues to weigh the uses to which their work would be put.[^9][^10]

Wiener died of a heart attack in Stockholm in March 1964 while traveling, having received the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon Johnson earlier that year. His insistence that the builders of automatic systems bear responsibility for their human effects, set against his own founding role in the science that made those systems possible, runs through the later literature on automation, computing, and technological risk.[^1][^9]

[^1]: "Norbert Wiener," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the 1894 birth, the Tufts and Harvard education, the MIT career, the coinage of cybernetics, and the 1964 death. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norbert-Wiener
[^2]: Wiener, Norbert. *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.* MIT Press, 1948.
[^3]: Wiener, Norbert. *Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth* (1953) and *I Am a Mathematician* (1956), MIT Press, on his upbringing, the Brownian-motion and harmonic-analysis work, and the Wiener filter.
[^4]: Galison, Peter. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," *Critical Inquiry,* vol. 21, no. 1 (1994), on the anti-aircraft predictor, Julian Bigelow, and the origins of feedback thinking. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343893
[^5]: Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," *Philosophy of Science,* vol. 10, no. 1 (1943), on feedback and purposeful behavior in animals and machines.
[^6]: "The Macy Conferences," American Society for Cybernetics, on the 1946 to 1953 meetings and the participation of Wiener, von Neumann, Shannon, Mead, Bateson, and McCulloch. https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm
[^7]: Wiener, Norbert. *The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.* Houghton Mifflin, 1950, on the second industrial revolution, automation and unemployment, and the degradation of human labor.
[^8]: "Norbert Wiener and the Counterculture," and contemporary accounts of *The Human Use of Human Beings,* on the "pleasant joke" warning about technological unemployment.
[^9]: Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. *Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics.* Basic Books, 2005, on the Reuther letter, *God and Golem, Inc.,* the National Book Award, the National Medal of Science, and the 1964 death.
[^10]: Wiener, Norbert. "A Scientist Rebels," *The Atlantic Monthly,* January 1947, declining to supply wartime research for possible weapons use. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1947/01/a-scientist-rebels/306533/