Michael Anthony Arbib (born May 28, 1940) is a brain theorist and cybernetician whose work has been influential in theoretical neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, robotics, mathematical systems theory, language evolution, and the conversation between architecture and neuroscience. Since his retirement from the University of Southern California in 2016, he has held emeritus status there as University Professor, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Professor in biological sciences biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience, and psychology.

Arbib was born in England on May 28, 1940, the oldest of four children. His parents moved to New Zealand when he was about 7, and on to Australia when he was about 9. and attended high school at The Scots College in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 he took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Sydney, with the University Medal in Pure Mathematics. However, his interests shifted from pure mathematics to the fields of cybernetics and automata theory, and his honours thesis on Turing Machines, Finite Automata, and Neural Nets was published in 1961.

Arbib received his PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. He was advised by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and Henry McKean. As a student, he also worked with Warren McCulloch, the co-inventor of the artificial neural network and finite-state machine. In the Northern summer of 1962, he gave the series of lectures at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, that became his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics. This was widely acclaimed, with a lead review in the Scientific American by Jacob Bronowski, and translations into Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

Following his PhD, Arbib had a postdoc at Imperial College with Jack Cowan, during which he wrote a foundational paper linking automata theory and system theory, conducted a lecture tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, and lectured for a term at the University of New south Wales before moving to Stanford for a postdoc with Rudolf E. Kálmán.

Arbib spent five years at Stanford, before moving to become becoming the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. He remained in the department until 1986, when he joined the University of Southern California. He retired and was granted emeritus status in 2016.

Arbib's collected papers from the period 1960 through 1985 are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. while those from 1986 through 2016 are held at the University of Southern California.

Arbib’s scholarly work is characterized by a sustained effort to develop mathematical and computational frameworks capable of explaining brain organization, cognition, and the relationship between neural mechanisms and behavior. His contributions span several distinct but interrelated research areas.

A central theme of Arbib’s research is the construction of biologically grounded computational models of neural systems. He played a significant role in establishing brain theory as a field that integrates neurobiology, systems theory, and computation. His work emphasized how large-scale functional architectures can emerge from interacting neural subsystems rather than from localized modules alone.