“Wiener, in a sense, did a lot to push the idea of cybernetics, which is a somewhat vague idea, and got a lot of worldwide publicity for it,” said Stanford’s Thomas Kailath. “But that wasn’t Shannon’s personality at all. Wiener loved the publicity, and Shannon could not have cared less.” The popular success of Cybernetics launched a debate over priority within the small clique of mathematicians who wanted to know whether Wiener or Shannon could rightly claim credit for information theory. It also gave rise to a dispute over whether or not Wiener—whose chapter on information as a statistical
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