Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 - March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician, known as the founder of cybernetics. He coined the term in his book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948), widely recognized as one of the most important books of contemporary scientific thinking. He is also considered to be the first American-born and trained mathematician on an intellectual par with the traditional bastions of mathematical learning in Europe. He thus represents a watershed period in American mathematics.
Biography
Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo and Bertha Wiener. Leo was an instructor in Slavic Languages at Harvard who used his own experimental high-pressure methods to educate Norbert at home until he was seven; he entered school only briefly before resuming the majority of his studies at home. Between his father's tutelage and his own abilities, Wiener became a child prodigy. In 1903 he returned to school, graduating from Ayer High School in 1906.
In September 1906, aged eleven, he entered Tufts College to study mathematics. He received his bachelor's degree from Tufts in 1909 at the age of fourteen and entered Harvard. At Harvard he studied zoology, but in 1910 he transferred to Cornell to begin graduate studies in philosophy. The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies. Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 at age of 18, for a dissertation on mathematical logic.
From Harvard he went to Cambridge, England and studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy. In 1914, he studied at Göttingen, Germany under David Hilbert and Edmund Landau. He then returned to Cambridge and then back to the USA. In 1915-16, he taught philosophy courses at Harvard, worked for General Electric and then for Encyclopedia Americana before working on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He remained in Maryland until the end of the war, when he took up a post as instructor in mathematics at MIT (after being rejected for a position at the University of Melbourne). Wiener was known among the students for his poor lecture style, his jokes, and his absent-mindedness. He was known to be hypersensitive to criticism, and subject to fits of depression.
While working at MIT he frequently travelled to Europe. In 1926, he married a German immigrant named Margaret Engemann, with whom he would have two daughters, and then returned to Europe as a Guggenheim scholar. He spent most of his time at Göttingen or with Hardy at Cambridge, working on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems among other problems.
During World War II, his work on gunnery control encouraged him to synthesize his interests in communication theory, and formulate cybernetics. After the war, his prominence vouchsafed him enough clout to arrange for some of the brightest young researchers in artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuropsychology, including Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts, to join him at MIT. They came, but then, suddenly and inexplicably, he broke off all contact with the members of this painstakingly assembled research team. While speculation still flourishes as to the reasons why, it was determined several years later that the split was maliciously engineered by his emotionally deaf wife Margaret Wiener. This led to the premature end of one of the most promising scientific collaborative research teams of the era.
Nevertheless, Wiener went on himself to break new ground in cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He remained generous with his research, freely sharing his theories and findings as well as credit for his work. Unfortunately this led to suspicion during the Cold War era, due to his non-partisan support of researchers in the Soviet Union.
After World War II, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he saw as political interference in scientific research, and the militarization of science. He published the article "A Scientist Rebels" in the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. He himself refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects.
He was a strong proponent for using automation to improve the standard of living, and to develop impoverished areas. These ideas were very influential in India, and he advised the Indian government during the 1950s.
Wiener died in 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden, at age 69.
Anecdotes
- Wiener was quite short, five foot even, in fact. He was also given to the kind of absent-mindedness for which academics are known. MIT corridors have, or at least used to have, wainscoting, that is, a strip of wood with a moulded groove in it running along a wall about three and a half feet off the ground. The nominal purpose of this is to prevent chair backs from scratching the paint on walls and to provide a boundary between the darker shade which the lower part of walls are usually painted and the lighter shade above. It was Wiener's custom to stick his finger in this groove, close his eyes, lower his head in thought and walk down a corridor, guided by the wainscoting. Professors were told to close their classroom doors or Wiener would be apt to follow the corridor wainscoting to the door jamb of the classroom and pick up the trail of the wainscoting on the inside of the classroom, following it around the room until it led him back to the corridor.
- During one of these trips down the hallway, Wiener was interrupted by several of his students who talked to him for several minutes about what they were working on. After the conversation had ended, Wiener asked one of them "Could you please tell me, in which direction was I travelling when you stopped me?" One of them replied, somewhat confusedly, "You were coming from over there [gesturing] this way [gesturing]." Wiener replied, "Ah, then it is likely that I have already had lunch. Thank you." and continued down the hallway to his office.
- Being at a total loss, and having exhausted all other sources of resolution, a young graduate student came to Full Professor Doctor Norbert Wiener's office one day with a seemingly intractable differential equation, No. 27 from a textbook. The student asked Wiener if he could help him with it. Wiener looked at the equation for a moment, sat back in his chair, and tilted his head to point it at the ceiling. He silently stayed that way for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds. He then leaned forward and wrote down the longish solution on a legal pad, and looked at the student expectantly. After an awkward moment the student said "Dr. Wiener, I'm sorry, but I still can't see how you've derived this." Wiener looked confused for a moment, and then relaxed. He looked at the equation for a moment, sat back in his chair, and tilted his head to point it at the ceiling. He silently stayed that way for perhaps forty or fifty seconds. He then leaned forward and wrote down the longish solution on a legal pad, and looked at the student expectantly. After an even more awkward moment, the student said "Dr. Wiener, I'm very sorry, but I still don't see it." Wiener replied in as annoyed a voice as he ever expressed, "What do you want, I've just done it two different ways!"
- John Challifour told this story in April 2005 to his complex analysis class: Knowing of his absent-mindedness quite well, Norbert Wiener's wife knew it would be necessary to remind him that they were moving house the morning of the last day in their old place. She told him, "Norbert, remember that when you come home from work today, you must go to the new house, because this house won't be ours anymore." "Yes, dear," Professor Wiener condescended to her, in the way academics often do to their better halves. Nevertheless, just as his wife predicted, at the end of the day Norbert did go back to his old house, and he was confused to see that his supper was not ready, and indeed that there were no recognizable objects in the house. After a glance inside, he looked out again and saw a young girl swinging on the door of the fence that enclosed the house. "Little girl," Professor Wiener asked, "who lives in this house?" The girl responded, "It's OK, Daddy. Mommy told me you'd forget to come to the new house."
Awards and honors
Wiener won the Bôcher Prize in 1933 and the National Medal of Science in 1964, shortly before his death.
The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics was endowed in 1967 in honor of Norbert Wiener by MIT's mathematics department and is provided jointly by the American Mathematical Society and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
The Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility awarded annually by CPSR, was established in 1987 in honor of Norbert Wiener to recognize contributions by computer professionals to socially responsible use of computers.
The Wiener crater on the far side of the Moon was named for him.
Publications
Published works include:
- Cybernetics (1948)
- The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
- Ex-Prodigy (1953)
- I am a Mathematician (1956)
- Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958)
- God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964)
- Invention (1993)
A brief profile of Dr. Wiener is given in The Observer newspaper, Sunday, 28 January 1951.
References
- Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman (2004); Dark Hero of the Information Age.