Teleology which focuses instead on goal-contribution. With the objective goals of organisms being survival and inclusive fitness, Piccinini and Maley define teleological functions to be “a stable contribution by a trait (or component, activity, property) of organisms belonging to a biological population to an objective goal of those organisms.” Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in
Wiener–Hopf method Wiener–Hopf method The Wiener–Hopf method is a mathematical technique widely used in applied mathematics. It was initially developed by Norbert Wiener and Eberhard Hopf as a method to solve systems of integral equations, but has found wider use in solving two-dimensional partial differential equations with mixed boundary conditions on the same boundary. In general, the method works by exploiting the complex-analytical properties of transformed functions. Typically, the standard Fourier transform is used, but examples exist using other transforms, such as the Mellin transform. In general, the governing equations and boundary conditions are transformed and these transforms are used to define