Garry Olsh · CC0

A child prodigy who entered Tufts College at eleven and had his PhD by nineteen, Wiener spent his career at MIT studying the mathematics of noise, feedback, and control in machines and living systems alike. He coined the term cybernetics for that field, arguing that intelligent behavior in animals and machines both arise from feedback mechanisms — an idea that anticipated the development of artificial intelligence by decades. His work shaped Claude Shannon's information theory and reached thinkers as different as John von Neumann and the anthropologist Margaret Mead.