Heinz von Foerster was born 1911 in Vienna, Austria, where he studied physics 
at the Vienna Technical University. 1944 he received a Ph.D. in physics at the 
University Breslau.

Together with Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and others,
Heinz von Foerster was the architect of cybernetics. In particular he developed a
second-order cybernetics which focus on self-referential systems and the importance
of eigenbehaviors for the explanation of complex phenomena.

(www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm)