Norbert Wiener

Mathematician

• Born: November 26, 1894
• Birthplace: Columbia, Missouri
• Died: March 18, 1964
• Place of death: Stockholm, Sweden

American mathematician

Wiener was a distinguished American mathematician credited with a founding of cybernetics, a science that facilitates comparison of biological and electronic systems by focusing on communication, feedback, and control.

Areas of achievement Mathematics, computer science

Early Life

In Ex-Prodigy (1964), the first volume of his two-volume autobiography, Norbert Wiener (WEE-nuhr) describes in detail his precocious youth and his relationship with his father, a brilliant and very forceful personality. Wiener’s father, Leo Wiener, was born in the ghetto area of czarist Russia. At the age of thirteen, Leo became self-supporting. In spite of anti-Semitic laws and customs, he managed to graduate from a Warsaw gymnasium. After emigrating to the United States, he worked in factories and on farms. He never received a university education, but he became a professor of Slavic languages, first at the University of Missouri and then at Harvard. Leo’s wife and Norbert’s mother, Bertha Kahn Wiener, was born in Missouri of German Jewish parents. Her family was in the process of being assimilated; each of her brothers had married a non-Jew. Norbert was not reared with an awareness of his own Jewish heritage and later bitterly resented what he came to believe was his mother’s anti-Semitism.

Leo Wiener believed in beginning the education of children at a very early age and in expecting substantial intellectual progress during childhood. Coached by his father, Norbert Wiener learned to read by the time that he was three. His father educated him at home until he was nine, when he entered Ayer High School. At eleven, he entered Tufts College, where he became especially interested in physics, chemistry, and biology. After graduating from Tufts, he enrolled before his fifteenth year in zoology at Harvard Graduate School. Since Norbert lacked the coordination and eyesight essential for laboratory work in the life sciences, at his father’s suggestion, he shifted his program of study to philosophy. Wiener later resented his father’s involvement in this decision.

Wiener’s doctoral thesis involved a comparison of Ernst Schroeder’s algebra of relatives with that of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Of his thesis, he later commented, “When I came to study under Bertrand Russell in England, I learned that I had missed almost every issue of true philosophical significance.”

During his last year at Harvard, Wiener was awarded a traveling scholarship, which he used to visit England and Germany. At Cambridge, his main course work was with Russell. Wiener enjoyed his time in Cambridge, finding it a more sympathetic environment than Harvard because eccentricity and individuality were not only tolerated but even highly valued in this English university town. Since Russell was to be away from Cambridge during the spring term, Wiener visited Göttingen, where he met some of the greatest of the mathematicians and physicists of his day. His experiences in Göttingen also contributed to his social maturity, because he found that he could get along with many different types of people.

In 1919, after an instructorship at the University of Maine and service on the ballistics staff at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Wiener joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1924, he was promoted to an assistant professor, and in 1926, he married Margaret Engemann; his parents strongly approved of this marriage, which they even promoted. The Wieners’ two daughters were named Barbara and Peggy. The first volume of Wiener’s autobiography concludes with his marriage at the age of thirty-one.

Like his father, Wiener was a vegetarian. To his contemporaries he seemed highly eccentric in appearance. Stephen Toulmin, director of the Nuffield Foundation Unit for the History of Ideas in London, described him in 1964 in the New York Review as “the most peculiar American in my experience, and even in England I can liken him only to the late Sir Thomas Beecham. . . . Both of them were short, myopic, tubby. . . . With it, there went a rotundity of expression in public conversation I nearly said monologue which was too puckish to be called pompous, and an assumed air of prejudice and self-importance so extreme it became a joy to observe.”

Wiener described his father, Leo, as “brilliant,” “absentminded,” and “hot-tempered,” adjectives his contemporaries thought equally apt as a description of him. Wiener would go to sleep and even snore during discussions and classroom seminars. Since he seemed able to process information while sleeping, much to the surprise and even chagrin of his colleagues and students, he would sometimes awaken and make very perceptive comments concerning the topic being discussed.

Life’s Work

In 1929, Wiener was given the rank of associate professor, and after the appearance of important papers on generalized harmonic analysis (1930) and Tauberian theorems (1932), he was promoted to a professorship in 1932. Although he remained based at MIT, he welcomed opportunities to travel abroad, spending a year in Beijing, China, during the academic year 1935-1936.

Throughout his career, Wiener experienced doubts concerning his reputation among other mathematicians. In 1933, however, he was awarded the Bôcher Prize, which is awarded only every five years by the American Mathematical Society. Since his work on generalized harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems had appeared in 1930 and 1932, it is clear that the society recognized his achievements as soon as it was possible to do so.

During the war years, Wiener received a small grant to work on a design for an apparatus that would direct antiaircraft guns effectively. Solving this problem led Wiener to develop a theory of prediction and pointed the way toward cybernetics, the major contribution of his adult years. Wiener’s prediction theory could have been synthesized from his previous work, but it was his solution to a concrete problem that prompted this important synthesis. He had to determine the position and direction of flight of airplanes and then extrapolate over the flight time of the projectile to be sure that the projectile would reach the airplane.

From a mathematical perspective, this theory was Wiener’s principal contribution to cybernetics. When his book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was published in 1948, Wiener became a public figure. Sometimes called the philosopher of automation, Wiener contributed to cybernetics as an organizer, popularizer, and enthusiastic interpreter.

The word “cybernetics” derives from the Greek for “helmsman.” Wiener proposed the term as a replacement for the title Conference for Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological Systems. Cybernetics concerns the science of communication and control theory, especially in regard to the comparative analysis of automatic control systems, the brain and nervous system as compared with mechanical-electrical communication systems. According to Wiener, the intellectual concerns of cybernetics distinguish modern civilization from that of previous centuries: “The thought of every age is reflected in its technique. . . . If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of the clocks, and the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control.” As early as 1948, Wiener viewed the new concepts of message, information, feedback, and control as a supplement to physics that would facilitate a fully scientific description of an organism. These concepts now pervade neurobiology, biochemistry, genetics, psychology, and other disciplines concerned with organisms.

In 1964, in recognition of Wiener’s contribution to theoretical mathematics and the sciences, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the National Medal of Science. Shortly thereafter, while traveling in Sweden, Wiener died, on March 18, 1964.

Significance

In the years preceding World War II, Wiener was plagued by continual doubts about his productivity. His colleagues and students had to assure and reassure him that his current work was indeed excellent. This insecurity, which Wiener himself attributed to the pressures he experienced in early childhood, was never entirely overcome but did not keep Wiener from taking a very independent position on military contracts. Advocating noncooperation as a policy for scientists, Wiener commented, “It is perfectly clear also that to disseminate information about a weapon in the present state of our civilization is to make it practically certain that that weapon will be used.” Wiener’s position on noncooperation was supported by Albert Einstein, but as a consequence of his refusal to accept military grants and contracts, he had to discover other means of generating funds to maintain his research. His books on cybernetics and technology were addressed to the general public and were financially successful.

Wiener is acknowledged as the founder of cybernetics, although his contributions represented a synthesis of many concepts already implicit in the methodology of the social sciences. The basis for treating humans and machines with the same theory derives not from analysis of physical constituents but from patterns of communication and control. Wiener was skeptical about the efficacy of quantitative description in these fields, but he did show that patterns of communication can be described mathematically by using statistics.

At the same time, Wiener opposed any simplistic application of the human/machine model. He opposed the use of game theory as a means of determining military or political strategy. In spite of the great impact that cybernetics had on the social sciences, Wiener remained skeptical about sociological and economic predictions, arguing that the statistical runs were too short and that the observations were conditioned by interaction between the social scientist and his subject.

Author of a number of books addressed to the educated general public, such as The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener set out to inform the public about both the potential and the pitfalls of communications and computation technology. He was concerned about the impact of automation on the employment of laborers but recognized that machines might also help to improve working conditions. Advocating the independent and unbiased study of the relationship between humans and machines, Wiener tried to assess what the relationship should be between a human and a mechanical translator, between a computerized diagnosis and a physician’s diagnosis. He pointed out as well that the paradigm of “man as master” and “machine as slave” dangerously ignores the way in which machines may influence decisions and shape the course of events, if only because of their much greater speed of action.

Bibliography

Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books, 2005. The authors reassess Wiener’s legacy, arguing that he has “fallen between the cracks of the Information Age.” They trace his life, his development of cybernetics, and how he later realized the implications of the science he had created.

Grattan-Guiness, I. “Wiener on the Logics of Russell and Schroeder: An Account of His Doctor’s Thesis, and of His Discussion of It with Russell.” Annals of Science 32 (1975): 103-132. Discussion of Wiener’s intellectual relation to Bertrand Russell.

Levinson, Norman. “Wiener’s Life.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 72 (1966): 1-32. Biographical description of Wiener and discussion of his contributions to mathematics. Levinson, Wiener’s student and colleague, regards most of Wiener’s work in cybernetics as not mathematical.

Struik, Dirk J. “Norbert Wiener: Colleague and Friend.” American Dialog 3 (March, April, 1966): 34-37. Essay by a close personal friend of Wiener. As a result of his Marxist views, Struik was indicted during the anticommunist crusades of the 1950’s. Wiener strongly supported his friend, threatening to resign from MIT if the institution failed to support Struik.

Wiener, Norbert. Collected Works with Commentaries. Edited by P. Masani. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976-1985. Comprises all of Wiener’s scholarly publications other than books and some previously unpublished material. Organized to show the author’s intellectual evolution and supplemented with commentaries by important scholars. Best for advanced students. Includes a complete bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964. First volume of Wiener’s autobiography, covering the years from 1894 to 1926.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Very popular nonmathematical treatment of cybernetics. Newer editions available.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. I Am a Mathematician. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964. Second volume of Wiener’s autobiography, covering the years from 1926 to 1964.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “A Scientist Rebels.” The Atlantic Monthly. 179 (1947): 46. Proposes that scientists should refuse to engage in weapons research.

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