La Cybernetique
YEAR: 1963
ITEM: Book
COMPANY: Presses Universitaires de France
COUNTRY: France
IN OUR COLLECTION: Yes
La Cybernetique was written by French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer Louis Couffignal. Born in Monflanquin in 1902, Louis taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy, and eventually at the Buffon School.
After joining the school, Couffignal hesitated to write a thesis on Symbolic Logic but after his meetings with Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne, he decided to focus on machines and Mechanical Logic. He published a variety of notes at the Academy of Sciences, with a focus on using binary computation by machines to solve new problems. Following Leibinz, he promoted binary numbers as the basis of calculating machines. Couffignal received his Doctorate of Sciences in 1938 with his thesis on Mechanical Analysis, demonstrating applications for machines to calculate celestial machines. Couffignal took an interest in Cybernetics, influenced by his meetings with Louis Lapicque in 1941 and the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener in 1946. With Lapicque, Couffignal compared the functioning of the nervous system and that of machines, as Wiener prepared his book about Cybernetics, the book that established the foundation of the subject.
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