Norbert Wiener

Cybernetics; feedback control.

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was a professor of mathematics at MIT for most of his career. He founded cybernetics as a formal discipline, articulated in his 1948 work 'Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine'. His core insight — that feedback loops are the governing mechanism in both biological organisms and engineered systems — underpins modern control theory, systems thinking, and automation.