Norbert Wiener

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Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 Columbia, Missouri – March 18, 1964 Stockholm Sweden) was an American theoretical and applied mathematician. He was a pioneer in the study of stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication and control systems. Wiener is perhaps best known as the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Norbert Wiener was the first child of Leo Wiener, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, and Bertha Kahn, of German-Jewish descent. Employing high pressure methods of his own invention, Leo educated Norbert at home until 1903, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Thanks to his father's tutelage and his own abilities, Wiener became a child prodigy. The first volume of Wiener's autobiography dwells on this period in considerable detail. Although Leo earned his living teaching German and Slavic languages, he read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited much. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics, and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.

After graduating from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, Wiener entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies in zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell to study philosophy. The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies.

Back at Harvard, Wiener came under the influence of Edward Vermilye Huntington, whose mathematical interests ranged from axiomatic foundations to problems posed by engineering. Harvard awarded Wiener a Ph.D. in 1912, when he was a mere 18, for a dissertation on mathematical logic, supervised by Karl Schmidt, whose essential results were published as Wiener (1914). In that dissertation, he was the first to see that the ordered pair can be defined in terms of elementary set theory. Hence relations can be wholly grounded in set theory, so that the theory of relations does not require any axioms or primitive notions distinct from those of set theory. In 1921, Kuratowski proposed a simplification of Wiener's definition of the ordered pair, and that simplification has been in common use ever since.

In 1914, Wiener travelled to Europe, to study under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and under David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. In 1915-16, he taught philosophy at Harvard, then worked for General Electric and wrote for the Encyclopedia Americana. When World War I broke out, Oswald Veblen invited him to work on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Thus Wiener the eventual pacifist wore a uniform 1917-18. Living and working with other mathematicians strengthened and deepened his interest in mathematics.

After the war, Wiener was unable to secure a position at Harvard because he was Jewish (despite his father being the first tenured Jew at Harvard), and was rejected for a position at the University of Melbourne. At W. F. Osgood's invitation, Wiener became an instructor in mathematics at MIT, where he spent the remainder of his career, rising to Professor.

In 1926, Wiener returned to Europe as a Guggenheim scholar. He spent most of his time at Göttingen and with Hardy at Cambridge, working on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis, and the Tauberian theorems.

Wiener's parents did not tell him that he was of Jewish ancestry. In 1926, his parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann, who was not Jewish; they had two daughters. Margaret was a Nazi sympathizer and did not keep that fact a secret.

During World War II, his work on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns led Wiener to communication theory and eventually to formulate cybernetics. After the war, his prominence helped MIT to recruit what was perhaps the world's first research team in cognitive science, made up of some of the brightest researchers in neuropsychology and the mathematics and biophysics of the nervous system, including Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts. These men went on to make pioneering contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. Shortly after this painstakingly assembled research group was formed, Wiener suddenly and inexplicably broke off all contact with its members. Speculation still flourishes as to why this split occurred; were the reasons professional, was his hypersensitive personality to blame, or did the split result from intrigues by his spouse Margaret? Whatever the reason, the split led to the premature end of one of the most promising scientific research teams of the era.

Nevertheless, Wiener went on to break new ground in cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He freely shared his theories and findings, and generously credited the contributions of others. This stance resulted in his being well-disposed towards Soviet researchers and their findings, which placed him under regrettable suspicion during the Cold War. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to overcome economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, whose government he advised during the 1950s.

Wiener declined an invitation to join the Manhattan Project, and was arguably the most distinguished scientist to do so. After the war, he became increasingly concerned with what he saw as political interference in scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" in the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener's stance towards nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with that of John von Neumann is the central theme of Heims (1980).

[edit] Anecdotes

At MIT, Wiener was notorious for his poor lecturing style, his jokes, and his absent-mindedness. He was known to be hypersensitive to criticism, and subject to fits of depression. He also became the butt of many comical anecdotes, a few of which follow:

  1. 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 molded 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.
  2. 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. [A very similar anecdote has been attributed to Albert Einstein.]
  3. 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!" (A similar incident, with the solution as ex, is attributed to John Von Neumann)
  4. After several years teaching at MIT, the Wieners moved to a larger house. Knowing her husband was likely to forget where he now lived, Mrs. Wiener wrote down the address of the new house on a piece of paper and made him put it in his shirt pocket. At lunchtime, an inspiring idea came to the professor, who proceeded to pull out the paper and scribble down calculations, and to subsequently proceed to find a flaw and throw the paper away in disgust. At the end of the day, it occurred to Wiener that he had thrown away his address. He now had no idea where his home was. Putting his mind to work, he concocted a plan: go to his old home and wait to be rescued. Surely Margaret would realize he was lost and come to pick him up. When he arrived at the house, there was a little girl standing out front. "Excuse me, little girl," he asked, "would you happen to know where the people who used to live here moved to?" "It's okay, Daddy," the girl replied, "Mommy sent me to get you." (Decades later, Norbert Wiener's daughter was tracked down by a mathematics newsletter. She said the story was essentially correct, except that Wiener had not forgotten who she was.)
  5. In 1945, in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, Norbert Wiener was hard at work in perfecting the antiaircraft gun's fire control system used in the Pacific theater.
    1. At that time, computers were analog, using gears, cams, and motors. The chain of events for shooting at enemy aircraft includes: (a) detection and location of enemy aircraft by radar, (b) from the measured speed and direction, estimate the future aircraft location, (c) feed that direction and elevation data to the guns, and most important (d) set the altitude at which the shell is to explode. Field performance data were constantly fed back to Dr. Wiener and he in turn kept refining his equations to be sent to all American ships.
    2. Japan, in the meantime, was perfecting their Kamikaze tactics. They replaced single plane attacks, which were vulnerable to antiaircraft guns, by coordinated mass attacks, insuring that at least one or more planes would get past the defenses.
    3. A few days before Japan surrendered, one American destroyer happened to be the target of such a mass Kamikaze attack consisting about two dozen suicide bombers. All hands on the American ship performed flawlessly and, having just received Dr. Wiener's latest equations, managed to shoot down every one of the attacking Japanese planes. Noting that if just one enemy plane got through, all hands could be lost, they could not help but to worship Dr. Wiener. After the war, the entire crew paid a visit to him in grateful tribute.

[edit] Awards and honors

[edit] See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] Writings

  • 1914. "A simplification in the logic of relations" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 224-27.
  • 1965 (1948). Cybernetics. MIT Press.
  • 1964 (1930). Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (known during the war as the yellow peril). MIT Press.
  • 1988 (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Da Capo Press.
  • 1966. Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory. MIT Press.
  • 1966. Generalized Harmonic Analysis and Tauberian Theorems. MIT Press.
  • 1966. God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT Press.
  • 1988. The Fourier Integral and Certain of its Applications (Cambridge Mathematical Library). Cambridge Univ. Press.
  • 1994. Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas. MIT Press.

Autobiography:

  • 1953. Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. MIT Press.
  • 1956. I am a Mathematician. MIT Press.

Bibliography:

[edit] References

  • Bynum, Terrell W., "Norbert Wiener's Vision: The impact of "the automatic age" on our moral lives."
  • Conway, F., and Siegelman, J., 2005. Dark Hero of the Information Age: in search of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. Basic Books, New York. 423pp. ISBN 0-7382-0368-8
  • Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
  • Bluma, Lars, 2005. Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Münster.
  • Heims, Steve J., 1980. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. MIT Press.
  • Heims, Steve J., 1993. Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953. MIT Press.
  • Ilgauds, Hans Joachim, 1980. Norbert Wiener.
  • Masani, P. Rustom, 1990. Norbert Wiener 1894-1964. Birkhauser.

A brief profile of Dr. Wiener is given in The Observer newspaper, Sunday, 28 January 1951.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
General subfields and scientists in Cybernetics
K1 Polycontexturality · Second-order cybernetics
K2 Catastrophe theory · Connectionism · Control theory · Decision theory · Information theory · Semiotics · Synergetics · Sociosynergetics · Systems theory
K3 Biological cybernetics · Biomedical cybernetics · Biorobotics · Computational neuroscience · Homeostasis · Medical cybernetics · Neuro cybernetics · Sociocybernetics
Cyberneticians William Ross Ashby · Claude Bernard · Valentin Braitenberg · Ludwig von Bertalanffy · Gordon S. Brown · George S. Chandy · Joseph J. DiStefano III · Heinz von Foerster · Charles François · Jay Forrester · Buckminster Fuller · Ernst von Glasersfeld · Francis Heylighen · Erich von Holst · Stuart Kauffman · Bradford Keeney · Sergei P. Kurdyumov · Niklas Luhmann · Warren McCulloch · Humberto Maturana · Horst Mittelstaedt · Talcott Parsons · Gordon Pask · Walter Pitts · Alfred Radcliffe-Brown · Robert Trappl · Valentin Turchin · Francisco Varela · Frederic Vester · John N. Warfield · Kevin Warwick · Norbert Wiener
Persondata
NAME Wiener, Norbert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Columbia, Missouri
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1964
PLACE OF DEATH Stockholm, Sweden
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