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
Giovanni Forni (mathematician) American Mathematical Society. Giovanni Forni (mathematician) Giovanni Forni is an Italian mathematician at the University of Maryland known for his research in dynamical systems. After graduating from the University of Bologna in 1989, he obtained his PhD in 1993 from Princeton University, under the supervision of John Mather. He was an invited speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. For his work on solutions of cohomological equations for flows on surfaces, and on the Kontsevich–Zorich conjecture concerning deviation of ergodic averages, he was awarded the 2008 Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems. In 2012, he became a