Norbert Wiener, (born Nov. 26, 1894, Columbia, Mo., U.S.—died March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Swed.), U.S. mathematician. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard at 18. He joined the faculty of MIT in 1919. His work on generalized harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems (which deduce the convergence of an infinite series) won the American Mathematical Society’s Bôcher Prize in 1933. The origin of cybernetics as an independent science is generally dated from the 1948 publication of his Cybernetics. He made contributions to such areas as stochastic processes, quantum theory, and, during World War II, gunfire control. Crater Wiener on the Moon is named for him.
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