biography
pronunciation:
[weener]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1894–1964)
|
| biography:
| Mathematician and communication theorist, born in Columbia, Missouri, USA. A child prodigy, he graduated from Tufts College at age 14, did graduate work at Harvard and Cornell, read philosophy at Cambridge University under Bertrand Russell, and then worked as an editor and taught philosophy and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before settling into its mathematics department (1919–64). During World War 1 he had done some special mathematics for the US Army, and in World War 2 he worked on developing high-speed electronic computer radar. Most of his early work in such fields as stochastic processes and harmonic analysis were too esoteric and complex for the public, but in 1948 he published Cybernetics - he coined the word from the Greek for ‘steersman’, and cyber- would become a commonly used prefix. Although it relied on such terms as feedback, input, output, and homeostasis, the book was written in a relatively accessible way and was the first work to inform an only dimly aware public of what was to be the wave of the future - the communication theory that would underlie the handling of information by electronic devices, namely computers. Known for various personal quirks, he had a reputation for being a terrible lecturer and a poor listener, and he could be both inappropriately pompous and playful. His fellow mathematicians would often criticize his work, but he remained a bridge between the leading edge of scientific thought and a broader public with such books as The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and Gold and Golem, Inc (1964). He was awarded the National Medal of Science (1964) in recognition of his ground-breaking work. |
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