Norbert Wiener was a math prodigy who developed the basis for fire control radar in anti-aircraft guns and earned a Harvard Ph.D. at age 18. The five-foot-tall math man spent a year lecturing in Calcutta and advised the Indian government to set up a system like the IITs:

Wiener’s lifelong interest in the cultures of the East also drew him to India in the 1950s where, at the request of the Indian government, he helped chart the course of that nation’s emergence as a technological power, which has put its scientists and technicians in the front ranks of today’s global economy. [Link]

In the 1950s, Wiener advised the Indian Government to train “a new generation of `non-commissioned officers of science and technology’”, because opportunity for growth lay in new technology industries. [Link]

… in the early 1950s he advised Nehru and other leaders to build “the class of skilled technicians” and “to create an entirely new kind of technological society.” [Link]

His theories had wide circulation in India and Russia, and he was welcomed personally by Nehru and other leaders in India. Wiener did advocate founding of technical institutes and the encouragement of home-grown technical industries… [Link]

Sadly, Wiener never received the accolades or deference in his own country that he enjoyed abroad… India lionized Wiener, and he was frequently invited there to teach them ways to modernize. (If he were alive today, Wiener would smile at how well India learned that lesson, becoming the site of so many outsourced American computer jobs.) Wiener in turn embraced the spirituality he found in Hinduism and Indian culture. [Link]

He also became a devotee of a Hindu guru:

Wiener, a descendant of renowned Eastern European rabbis and religious scholars–and purportedly of the greatest Hebrew sage of all time, Moses Maimonides–in his later years became a professed believer in reincarnation and the “bearded student” of a Hindu swami. [Link]

Wiener’s absent-mindedness was legendary:

It was Wiener’s custom to stick his finger in this groove, close his eyes, lower his head in thought and walk down a corridor, guided by the wainscoting. Professors were told to close their classroom doors or Wiener would be apt to follow the corridor wainscoting to the door jamb of the classroom and pick up the trail of the wainscoting on the inside of the classroom, following it around the room until it led him back to the corridor…

After several years teaching at MIT, the Wieners moved to a larger house. Knowing her husband was likely to forget where he now lived, Mrs. Wiener wrote down the address of the new house on a piece of paper and made him put it in his shirt pocket… At the end of the day, it occurred to Wiener that he had thrown away his address… When he arrived at the [old] house, there was a little girl standing out front… “It’s okay, Daddy… Mommy sent me to get you.” [Link]

His fame came from the weaponization of his theories on homeostatic systems and feedback loops:

Radar provides input to the antiaircraft gun’s fire control computer. The computer’s outputs feed into motors that steer the gun. Wiener recognized the challenge of finding the right place for the human being in a system that had to respond faster than human reflexes. Wiener analyzed feedback, studied defeating oscillations, and recognized the importance of properly coupling sensors to actuators. He framed the problem of fire control as one of control and communication.

Wiener went on to investigate how the body regulates the heart’s beating, to design prosthetic limbs, and to model nerve actions with mathematics and electronics. Common themes emerged from these diverse projects. They motivated him to propose a new, unified field of study. Cybernetics encompassed the study of control and communication, perception and manipulation, computation in machines and living organisms.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush the National Medal of Science. [Link]

The Wiener crater on the far side of the moon was named for him. [Link]

His theories found wide use in areas as disparate as prosthetics and troll moderation:

In the 1960s… the first myoelectric arm–one which uses electrical signals to stimulate and amplify residual nerves in an above-the-elbow amputee’s stump–became widely known in the US as the “Boston arm” because of its inventor, MIT mathematics professor Norbert Wiener. [Link]

Slashdot, the online community for ubergeeks, has created a homeostatic process via negative feedback in the form of ratings and filters… Slashdot… developed a rating system that provided unworthy comments with negative feedback. [Link]

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Wiener turned Cassandra about technology, pointing to widespread unemployment through automation, the rise of machines more intelligent than humans and the misapplication of technology to weapons of mass destruction. He became a prominent opponent of the defense industry. Coupled with his belief in free scientific exchange with the USSR, China and India, this made him persona non grata with the establishment:

Norbert Wiener first coined the term [’cybernetics’] back in 1948…. he used the used the word cybernation to describe the future era of computer-assisted industrial production… Wiener wrote that the new technology would ‘play no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor’ and would lead to ‘an unemployment situation in comparison with which… even the Depression of the 1930s will seem a pleasant joke’. [Link]

… Wiener worried that when a machine “became capable of responding to its incoming data at a pace no human could match, it might act in damaging ways before people could override its decisions…” [Link]

He predicted that unskilled human being may become obsolete, and “this thing will come like an earthquake…”

… things changed after the US dropped the A-bombs in Japan; Wiener was heartbroken. The day after Hiroshima, he is reported to have said that the bomb’s salient fact was not that it had brought a swift end to the war, but that it marked the coming of “a new world… with which we should have to live ever after”.

Sometime later when Boeing requested him for a copy of `Yellow Peril’ manuscript, a classified monograph of his, to use in designing guided missiles, Wiener refused. The January 1947 issue of Atlantic Monthly carried his protest; Flo and Jim note that Wiener was “the first scientist associated with the new communication and control technologies who publicly refused to cooperate with the government and its agents on a project ostensibly in the nation’s defence.” [Link]

I’m confident none of us would make a puerile joke about the Wiener measure:

He made his reputation as a pure mathematician by inventing concepts such as the “Wiener measure”… [which] gave mathematicians… a rigorous way to talk about the collective behavior of wiggly curves… [Link]

Wiener passed away of a heart attack in 1964.