Cyberneticist Cyberneticist A cyberneticist or a cybernetician is a person who practices cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster once told Stuart Umpleby that Norbert Wiener preferred the term "cybernetician" rather than "cyberneticist", perhaps because Wiener was a mathematician rather than a physicist. The word cyberneticist was used by Nicolas Rashevsky who began as a theoretical physicist, Robert Rosen, who began his career as a mathematician, regarded Neuro cybernetics—and more generally Biocybernetics—as fields closely allied to Mathematical Biology and Mathematical Biophysics in which control theory and dynamical system theories also play significant roles. Today "cybernetician" is preferred by members of the American Society for
Norbert Wiener Back at Harvard, Wiener became influenced by Edward Vermilye Huntington, whose mathematical interests ranged from axiomatic foundations to engineering problems. Harvard awarded Wiener a Ph.D. in 1912, when he was merely 17 years old, for a dissertation on mathematical logic, supervised by Karl Schmidt, the essential results of which were published as Wiener (1914). In that dissertation, he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory. Hence relations can be defined by set theory, thus the theory of relations does not require any axioms or primitive notions distinct from those