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 the subject until he left home. In his autobiography, Norbert described his father as calm and patient, unless he (Norbert) failed to give a correct answer, at which his father would lose his temper. He became an agnostic. After graduating from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, Wiener entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell to study philosophy. The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies.