Norbert Wiener:
He saw a world that focused on information, not energy; and on digital or numeric processes, not machine or analog. His theories not only laid the foundation for this new field of study, they also largely predicted the future development of computers."
http://www.angelfire.com/co/1x137/cyber.html
photocredit: adeptus
Norbert Wiener
"1894–1964, American mathematician, educator, and founder of the field of cybernetics, b. Columbia, Mo., grad. Tufts College, 1909, Ph.D. Harvard, 1913. In 1920 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became (1932) professor of mathematics. He made significant contributions to a number of areas of mathematics including harmonic analysis and Fourier transforms, but is best known for his theory of cybernetics, the comparative study of control and communication in humans and machines."
http://www.answers.com/topic/norbert-wiener
"Norbert Wiener may be the Tufts alumnus of most enduring fame. He was a world renowned mathematician and founder of the science of cybernetics and made some of the most important contributions to mathematics in the 20th century. Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, November 26, 1894. His father, Leo Wiener, was a Russian who became a self taught philologist of importance, aquiring a chair in Slavic languages at Harvard soon after Norbert's birth. Wiener's mother Bertha was born in Missouri. His brilliant, absentminded and hot-tempered father personally took charge of his son's education, and Wiener did not go to school until attending the high school in Ayer, Massachusetts, near his family's home in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts...
His colleague Dirk Struik, who was born in the same year, was also a good friend of the mathematics department at Tufts. When asked by David Rowe in a 1987 interview for the Mathematical Intelligencer what qualities he most admired in Wiener, Struik replied
I would say his courage and his sensitivity. He was a man of enormous scientific vitality which the years did not seem to diminish, but this was complemented by extreme sensitivity; he saw and felt things for which most of us were blind and unfeeling. I think this was partly due to the overly strict upbringing he had as a child prodigy. Wiener was a man of many moods, and these were reflected in his lectures, which ranged from among the worst to the very best I have ever heard. Sometimes he would lull his audience to sleep or get lost in his own computations---his performance in Göttingen was notoriously bad. But on other occasions I have seen him hold a group of colleagues and executives at breathless attention while he set forth his ideas in truly brilliant fashion. Wiener was among those scientists who recognized the full implications of the scientist's unique role in modern society and his responsibilities to it in the age of electronic computers and nuclear weapons. I well remember how upset he was the day after Hiroshima was bombed. When I remarked that because of Hiroshima the war against Japan should now come to a speedy close without much further bloodshed---a common sentiment at the time and the official justification still heard today---he replied that the explosion signified the beginning of a new and terrifying period in human history, in which the great powers might prove bound to push nuclear research to a destructive potential never dreamed of before. He also recognized and detested the racism and arrogance displayed in using the bomb against Asians.
He just saw further than the rest of us."
- Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [You need good math to get all of it. What? You find this unreasonable? Read his introduction.]
- Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series [Read the appendices first; published in paperback as Time Series]
- God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
- The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society [His own math-free popularization of Cybernetics.]
- Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas
- Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory [Statistics of transducers, basically. Very hard going, but does reward the effort.]
- Selected Papers [Gives a good feel for the range of his mathematical work; but extremely technical]
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/wiener.html
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