Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, USA. A mathematical prodigy, Wiener attended Tufts College and Cornell University, before receiving the doctoral degree in mathematics from Harvard University at the age of 18. Afterwards, he studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University and under David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen. A man of many interests, Wiener worked briefly as a journalist, engineer, and writer before accepting a position as assistant professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1919. He was promoted to professor in 1932.
Wiener is best known for the development of the science of cybernetics, summarized in his book Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published in 1948. In a sense, cybernetics anticipated the modern versions of computer science, communications theory, and control theory. Other books include The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958), The Tempter (1959), and God and Golem, Inc: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964).
In probability theory, Wiener made fundamental contributions in stochastic processes, particularly the process that models Brownian motion (now often called the Wiener process in his honor). Wiener received the Bôcher Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1933.
Norbert Wiener died on March 18, 1964 in Stockholm Sweden.