The American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) studied computing and control devices. Out of these studies he created the science of cybernetics.

Norbert Wiener was born on Nov. 26, 1894, at Cambridge, Mass. His father, Leo Wiener, professor of Slavonic languages and literature at Harvard University, determined to train the boy actively and single-mindedly as a scholar. Norbert was driven hard on the way to becoming a prodigy; fortunately he had the intellect and energy to emerge without undue suffering. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Tufts College at the age of 14 and obtained his doctorate at Harvard four years later.

Wiener was awarded a traveling fellowship which he spent at the two centers where learning, especially in the mathematical and physical sciences, was perhaps the most significant and the most exciting in Europe: the University of Cambridge, England, and the University of Göttingen, Germany. After a varied...