A mathematician noticed thermostats, animals, and factories obey the same feedback law

Norbert Wiener spent WWII working on anti-aircraft systems that had to predict a pilot's next move from its past moves, and realized the same feedback-and-correction loop that steered a gun also governed how a nervous system controls a limb or a thermostat controls a room. He named the study of these self-correcting systems 'cybernetics,' a field that fed directly into modern robotics and control theory.

— Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine — 1948
Go deeper: get the book →