In 1948, Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics,which eventually inspired the buzz-word "cyberspace". Wiener created the word "cybernetics" from the Greek for "governor", as in a device for a steam engine, or "steersman" for a ship. Cybernetics, Wiener told us, is the study of information and control in humans and machines, with automation as a subfield.

Wiener's Cybernetics is a difficult book, even for mathematically trained specialists. But Wiener did write a popularization for the general public, The Human Use of Human Beings (1952), which is back in print. (Incidentally, this book contains a chapter dealing with what bumper stickers refer to in "Beam me up, Scotty!" Wiener described teleportation -- electronic transmission of humans as if they were messages -- long before Star Trek, but has never been given credit for this.) And Wiener's 1966 book, God and Golem carries the warning (in paraphrase of Jesus' statement about God and Caesar), "Render unto the computer the things that are the computer's, and unto Man the things that are Man's".

Immediately after Cybernetics appeared in 1948, Wiener embarked upon a campaign warning that most "white collars" engage in nonhuman work best done by or with computers and most factory "blue-collars" engage in nonhuman work best done by robots and computers. (In January, 1949, Esther and I heard him give a speech on this at The New York Academy of Medicine, NYC.) Wiener, thus, warned us about the downsizing of the 90's, which cost the jobs of so many "white-collars" and "blue-collars", and especially those in "middle management". Wiener took his message to labor unions, chambers of commerce, politicians, reporters, etc. -- but was roundly laughed at! Wiener and his math warned us! We blew it!

Wiener made many imortant contributions to mathematics and to physics. After Heisenberg's breakthrough in quantum matrix theory, which applied only to periodic systems, Wiener advised Max Born that operator theory would achieve the desired results of matrix theory and apply to nonperiodic systems. This anticipated the beginnings of work by Schönberg, Dirac, and others. Wiener's work in signal theory had a result which independently arrived at the equivalent of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Pushed by his father, a professor of philology who eventually came to Harvard University, Wiener entered Harvard at age 12. Read two two volumes of his autobiography, "Ex-Prodigy" and "I Am a Mathematician".