Cybernetics for a Cyberworld: Standing on the Shoulders of Norbert Wiener

摘要

While people are generally aware of many of the nominal personalities of their day, they are, for the most part, unaware of the scientists who have moved their world. One such scientist was Norbert Wiener. His enlightening insights into the nature of feedback, i.e., cybernetic systems, had a profound impact upon our world. I experienced his influence, which permeated my own earliest scientific endeavors, as I looked to model and understand the regulatory functions of such feedforward and feedback capacities as they applied to physiological (i.e., homeostatic) forms of bodily functional stability [2], [3].