Commemorating Norbert Wiener's 120th Anniversary [Historical Perspectives]

Discusses the contributions of Norbert Wiener whose had a profound effect on many fields including signal processing, systems, and control theory. He is credited as being the father of cybernetics, which is "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine" [1]. Unlike many other well-known mathematicians, most of Norbert's publications were singly authored, and perhaps his greatest impact was felt in his books on topics ranging from applied mathematics to religion to philosophy, sometimes in the same book [1]-[5].