 He was the youngest member of the core group of the Macy conferences on Cybernetics and editor of the five volumes of "Cybernetics" (1949–1953), a series of conference transcripts that represent important foundational conversations in the field.It was von Foerster who suggested that Wiener's coinage "Cybernetics" be applied to this conference series, which had previously been called "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems".A 1960 issue of "Science" magazine included an article by von Foerster and his colleagues P. M. Mora and L. W. Amiot proposing a formula representing a best fit to available historical data on world population; the authors then predicted future population growth on the basis of this formula.