Throughout his life and long after his death, Wiener remained a mystery even to those who were closest to him, and nowhere more so than in his own spiritual excursions. Wiener also founded cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society. Norbert Wiener’s most popular book is The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. 1894, d. 1964) was an american mathematician and scientist the known as the founder of the Cybernetics. Wiener is considered the father of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, … It is simply a collated set of basic facts along with such illustrative tidbits as can be gleaned from Heims' The Cybernetics Group, Dupuy's Mechanization of the Mind, and other sources. Using this as a launching point, Rid looks at cybernetics through the decades to include not only the technological advances … Wiener’s science provided powerful new tools for understanding all manner of modern complexities, from the workings of the human genome, to the flow of human communication, to the dynamics of today’s global economy and the teeming networks of the World Wide Web. Time has confirmed that Wiener’s work was revolutionary in the scientific sense. Born on the doorstep of the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener was a descendant of Eastern European rabbis, scholars, and, purportedly, of the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. A second edition with minor changes and two additional chapters was published in 1961. Cybernetics Cybernetics is a term that was originated by American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) in the late 1940s. This chapter opens with a discussion of the mechanism of evolution by natural selection, which he refers to as "phylogenetic learning", since it is driven by a feedback mechanism caused by the success or otherwise in surviving and reproducing; and modifications of behaviour over a lifetime in response to experience, which he calls "ontogenetic learning". He was the first to perceive the essence of the new stuff called “information.” He worked with eminent biologists and neurophysiologists to crack the communication codes of the human nervous system, and with the engineers who incorporated those codes into the circuits of the first programmable “electronic brains.” He led the medical team that created the first bionic arm controlled by the user’s own thoughts. Wiener’s wartime vision grew into a new interdisciplinary science of communication, computation, and automatic control, spanning the forefronts of engineering, biology, and the social sciences. He was influenced by William Ross Ashby. And prate about an Elephant His father was a teacher of languages. In 1954, Marie Neurath produced a children's book Machines which seem to Think [1], which introduced the concepts of Cybernetics, control systems and negative feedback in an accessible format. Starting with an examination of the learning process in organisms, Wiener expands the discussion to John von Neumann's theory of games, and the application to military situations. The IEEE Foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization in the United States, fulfills its purpose by soliciting and managing donations, recognizing the generosity of our donors, supporting high impact IEEE programs and awarding grants to IEEE grassroots projects of strategic importance. (Abridged version of the Introduction to Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics). Acclaimed one of the 'seminal books... comparable in ultimate importance to... Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill,' Cybernetics was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the 'past four decades,' which may have a substantial impact on … After discussing the need to store both the data to be processed and the algorithms which are employed for processing that data, and the challenges involved in implementing a suitable memory system, he goes on to draw the parallels between binary digital computers and the nerve structures in organisms. In the opening section he distinguishes the predictable nature of astronomy from the challenges posed in meteorology, anticipating future developments in Chaos theory. Starting with an outline of the hierarchical nature of living organisms, and a discussion of the structure and organisation of colonies of symbiotic organisms, such as the Portuguese Man o' War, this chapter explores the parallels with the structure of human societies, and the challenges faced as they scale and complexity of society increases. Wiener named his science “cybernetics”—from the Greek word for steersman. This chapter lays down the foundations for the mathematical treatment of negative feedback in automated control systems. The rest of the chapter is mostly taken up with the development of a mathematical formulation of the operation of the principles underlying all of these processes. As with much of the other material in this book, these pointers have been both prophetic of future developments and suggestive of fruitful lines of research and enquiry. The esteemed Ethnarch provided a good primer on Cybernetics in the 128th episode of the Myth of the 20 Century podcast, which was about speculative fiction. In less than a decade, cybernetics transformed the day-to-day labors of workers in every industry and unleashed a flood of dazzling devices on postwar society. (He employed the archaic-sounding phrase "computing machine", because at the time of writing the word "computer" referred to a person who is employed to perform routine calculations). Major scientific and technological innovations often have profound social and ethical effects. It deals with the transmission or recording of a varying analog signal as a sequence of numerical samples, and lays much of the groundwork for the development of digital audio and telemetry over the past six decades. 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