Norbert Wiener
American mathematician, scientist in cybernetics and artificial intelligence (1894–1964)
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society. His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and others.
Wiener is credited as being one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms that could possibly be simulated by machines, an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.
Biography
Family and youth
Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Germany, respectively. Through his father, he was related to Maimonides, the famous 12th century rabbi, philosopher and physician from al-Andalus, as well as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837.
He met his paternal grandfather —Solomon Wiener, whom he describes as a scholarly journalist incapable of keeping the family together—only once in New York. Despite this, he was impressed by his grandfather's efforts to replace Yiddish in his lived environment with German.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q178577. VIAF identifies the subject as 51764820. The Library of Congress control number is n50016209. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1964, 1815 and 1837.
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This entry incorporates text from “Norbert Wiener” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.