Norbert Wiener developed the field of cybernetics, inspiring a generation of scientists to think of computer technology as a means to extend human capabilities. Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894, and received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University at the age of 18 for a thesis on mathematical logic. He subsequently studied under Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, England, and David Hilbert in Göttingen, Germany. After working as a journalist, university teacher, engineer, and writer, Wiener he was hired by MIT in 1919, coincidentally the same year as Vannevar Bush. In 1933, Wiener won the Bôcher Prize for his brilliant work on Tauberian theorems and generalized harmonic analysis.

Wiener's vision of cybernetics had a powerful influence on later generations of scientists, and inspired research into the potential to extend human capabilities with interfaces to sophisticated electronics, such as the user interface studies conducted by the SAGE program. Wiener changed the way everyone thought about computer technology, influencing several later developers of the Internet, most notably J.C.R. Licklider.

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Julian Bigelow, a mathematician and electrical engineer who was a pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and computing, died on Monday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. He was 89. In 1946, when John von Neumann set out to design and build a stored- program computer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he contacted the mathematician Norbert Weiner for a recommendation for a chief engineer. Dr. Weiner suggested Mr. Bigelow, with whom he had collaborated during World War II on the creation of fire-control systems for weapons. The resulting computer, which was known as the IAS and which was assembled beginning in June 1946, was one of a handful of computers like ENIAC, EDVAC, Whirlwind, EDSAC and Univac 1 whose construction brought the dawn of the information age. It was the IAS machine, however, whose basic design became the template for the modern computers that are now ubiquitous worldwide. Fifteen clones of the original IAS machine were built. The copies had names like Johniac and Maniac and they appeared all over the world, including Russia and Israel.

Before beginning his career as one of the world's first computer architects, Mr. Bigelow was the co-author of a seminal paper with Dr. Weiner and Arturo Rosenblueth, titled ''Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,'' which advanced a set of unifying principles about behavior that would come to serve as the foundation for the field of cybernetics, which studies the way mechanical, biological and electronic systems communicate and interact.

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John von Neumann (born Margittai Neumann János Lajos on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary; died February 8, 1957 in Washington D.C., United States) was a Austria-Hungary-born American mathematician who made contributions to quantum physics, functional analysis, set theory, topology, economics, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), statistics and many other mathematical fields as one of history's outstanding mathematicians. Most notably, von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics (see von Neumann algebra), a member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed — a group collectively referred to as the "demi-gods"), and the co-creator of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

The John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS, previously TIMS-ORSA) is awarded annually to an individual (or group) who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.The IEEE John von Neumann Medal is awarded annually by the IEEE "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The John von Neumann Lecture is given annually at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) by a researcher who has contributed to applied mathematics, and the chosen lecturer is also awarded a monetary prize. Von Neumann, a crater on Earth's Moon, is named after John von Neumann. The John von Neumann Computing Center in Princeton, New Jersey was named in his honour. The professional society of Hungarian computer scientists, Neumann János Számítógéptudományi Társaság, is named after John von Neumann. On May 4, 2005 the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series, a set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and Richard Feynman. The John von Neumann Award of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies was named in his honour, and is given every year from 1995 to professors, who had on outstanding contribution at the field of exact social sciences, and through their work they had a heavy influence to the professional development and thinking of the members of the college.

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Claude Bernard was born in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche-sur-Saône. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyon, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist's shop. His leisure hours were devoted to the composition of a vaudeville comedy, and the success it achieved moved him to attempt a prose drama in five acts, Arthur de Bretagne. At the age of twenty-one he went to Paris, armed with this play and an introduction to Saint-Marc Girardin, but the critic dissuaded him from adopting literature as a profession, and urged him rather to take up the study of medicine. This advice he followed, and in due course became interne at the Hotel Dieu. In this way he was brought into contact with the great physiologist, François Magendie, who was physician to the hospital, and whose official 'preparateur' at the Collège de France he became in 1841. In 1845 he married Françoise Marie (Fanny) Martin for convenience; the marriage was arranged by a colleague and her dowry helped finance his experiments. In 1847 he was appointed Magendie's deputy-professor at the college, and in 1855 he succeeded him as full professor.

Some time previously Bernard had been chosen the first occupant of the newly-instituted chair of physiology at the Sorbonne. There no laboratory was provided for his use, but Louis Napoleon, after an interview with him in 1864, supplied the deficiency, at the same time building a laboratory at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes, and establishing a professorship, which Bernard left the Sorbonne to accept in 1868, the year in which he was admitted a member of the Académie française. When he died he was accorded a public funeral – an honor which had never before been bestowed by France on a man of science.

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Walter Bradford Cannon was married to Cornelia James Cannon, a best-selling author. Although not mountaineers, during their honeymoon the couple were the first, on July 19, 1901, to reach the summit of the unclimbed southwest peak (2657 m or 8716 ft) of Goat Mountain, between Lake McDonald and Logan Pass in what is now Glacier National Park. The peak was subsequently named Mount Cannon by the United States Geological Survey [1].

The couple had five children. One son was Dr. Bradford Cannon, a military plastic surgeon and radiation researcher. The daughters are Wilma Cannon Fairbank and Marian Cannon Schlesinger, a painter and author living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was one of the first researchers to mix salts of heavy metals (including bismuth subnitrate, bismuth oxychloride, and barium sulfate) into foodstuffs in order to improve the contrast of X-ray images of the digestive tract. The barium meal is a modern derivative of this research.

He developed the theory with psychologists Philip Bard to try to explain why people feel emotions first and then act upon them.

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