Norbert Wiener
The founder of cybernetics, a field that explores control and communication in animals and machines.
Most quoted
"We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us."
— from Cybernetics, 1948
"The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence."
— from God and Golem, Inc., 1964
"It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback."
— from Cybernetics, 1948
All quotes by Norbert Wiener (386)
Science is a social enterprise.
The atom bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, but so is ignorance.
In mathematics, the truth is absolute.
The human mind is a pattern-recognizing machine.
War is the ultimate failure of communication.
Creativity is the ability to see patterns where others see chaos.
The universe is a great computer.
Education is the transmission of culture.
Probability is the guide of life.
The artist and the scientist both seek truth.
Machines will think, but they will not feel.
I have always been more interested in questions than in answers.
The second law of thermodynamics is the supreme law of nature.
Humor is the spice of life.
The integration of theory and practice is the essence of cybernetics.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
My life has been a series of accidents.
The end of the world is not near; it is here in our misuse of technology.
Wisdom comes from experience, but experience is the name we give to our mistakes.
We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
Contemporaries of Norbert Wiener
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964).