Norbert Wiener

American mathematician — founder of cybernetics and its ethics

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · United States · d. 26 November 1894 (Columbia, Missouri) — 18 March 1964 (Stockholm)

Entered Tufts at eleven, graduated at fourteen and took a Harvard doctorate in mathematical logic at eighteen. Wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction gave him the idea of feedback as a general principle, published as Cybernetics in 1948. Writing in Science on 6 May 1960, he warned that a machine learning faster than its programmers can follow will pursue the goal it was given, not the one intended.

2 storiesOfficial page →

Record

Life: 26 November 1894 (Columbia, Missouri) — 18 March 1964 (Stockholm)
Country: United States
Period: 20th century
Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Areas: Mathematics, Cybernetics, Philosophy of technology, Ethics of automation, Information theory
Major works: The Fourier Integral and Certain of its Applications (1933)
Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series (1949)
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1953)
I Am a Mathematician (1956)
Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958)
Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation (1960)
God and Golem, Inc. (1964)
Key concepts: Cybernetics, Feedback, The Wiener process, The Wiener filter, Homeostasis in machines, The human use of human beings, The sorcerer's apprentice problem in automation
Influenced by: Leo Wiener, Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, G. H. Hardy, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Arturo Rosenblueth
Sources: MacTutor History of Mathematics, Norbert Wiener
Wikipedia, Norbert Wiener
Tufts University Department of Mathematics, Norbert Wiener

Stories

World

Security Council meets on losing control of AI, briefed by the men who build it

This afternoon in New York, under the French presidency, the Security Council holds its first meeting devoted to the possibility that frontier AI systems slip out of human control. The briefers are Yoshua Bengio and the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. Whether the Council is the right room is itself in dispute.

Norbert Wiener

World Desk23 September 2026

Agenda

AI and the public sphere: who authors the decisions made in your name

The argument about artificial intelligence and democracy is usually run as a question of benefit and harm. The harder question is authorship. Arendt, Habermas, Foucault, Rousseau, Marx and Norbert Wiener each supply a piece of it, and the 2026 research supplies some awkward facts.