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Author: Jorgenveisdal
Machine Heart Compilation
Participation: Demon King, Zhang Qian, Egg Sauce
He is the father of cybernetics, a 9-year-old prodigy who attended high school and could solve an equation with one hand. He dabbled in philosophy, mathematics, physics, engineering, and biology, but at the same time he couldn't remember the color of his car, the colleagues he had been talking to for years, or even whether he had eaten lunch. This is a short biographical article about the life of Norbert Wiener.
"When we met just now, was I going to the teacher's cafeteria or did I just come out of it?" If I had just come out of it, I would have had lunch."
The American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was considered a very eccentric man.
Wiener graduated from high school at the age of 11 and entered Tufts University; three years later he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics; and at the age of 18, he received his doctorate from Harvard, with a doctoral thesis on mathematical logic. Writer Sylvia Nasar had this to say about him:
"The American von Loyman, erudite and creative, has made great contributions to pure mathematics and has achieved an equally excellent career in applied mathematics."
Wiener proposed cybernetics (the study of regulatory systems) that gave "feedback" a modern meaning. Cybernetics has spawned a number of transformative subfields, such as artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, neuroscience, and more.
Despite his outstanding professional achievements, Wiener is remembered for his unusual personality. According to his biographer, Wiener "walked along the corridors of MIT like a duck" for 30 years. He is one of MIT's most acclaimed and recognized mathematics professors, especially for his "absent-mindedness":
"Our offices are not far apart, and he often comes to my office to chat. A few years later I changed offices, and he walked in to introduce me and didn't realize that I was the person he used to talk to a lot. Just because I had a new office, he thought I was someone else."
——Phyllis L. Block
"He parked his car in the big parking lot when he went to the meeting. After the meeting, he went to the parking lot but forgot where to park the car, and even forgot the appearance of the car. So I had to wait until the other cars had been driven away before leaving with the remaining car."
——Howard Eves
This is the story of Norbert Wiener, the "short-sighted and often absent-minded professor."
Early life (1894–1909)
Norbert Wiener, 7, in 1901 (Source: MIT Museum)
Norbert Wiener was born in 1894 to a Jewish family in Missouri, both of Jewish descent from his father Leo Wiener and mother, Bertha Kahn. By the time Wiener was born, his father, Leo, was already a prominent historian and linguistician. Leo entered the University of Warsaw in 1880 and later studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin (formerly known as Frederick Wilhelm University) and was well versed in Chinese. In his autobiography, The Prodigy of yesteryear, Wiener recounts that "in my father's day, it was customary to speak multiple languages":
"German is his family language, Russian is the official language of the state ... French is the language of the school. In Eastern Europe (especially Poland), some people still maintain the Renaissance tradition of using Italian as another language of polite conversation."
Wiener's father, Leo, took this practice to the extreme, and leo is said to have spoken many languages at the age of ten. During his lifetime, Leo mastered 34 languages, including Gaelic, multiple Amerindian languages, and languages spoken by the Bantu people of sub-Saharan Africa.
Norbert Wiener's mother, Bertha Kahn, and father, Leo Wiener (Credit: MIT Museum)
Leo met Wiener's mother, Bertha, while working as a teacher in Kansas City, and married in 1893. Bertha was "a petite and lovely woman" who, according to the townspeople who later settled in the town, was "a pragmatic, 'simple' and sociable housewife". The two married in 1893, and Wiener was born a year later. Wiener takes his name from the protagonist in Robert Browning's In a Balcony.
prodigy
Wiener exhibited the qualities of quick thinking early on. According to his father, Leo, Wiener learned the alphabet at 18 months by watching her nanny write on the beach:
When Wiener was 18 months old, one day his nanny was entertaining himself by writing letters on the sand by the sea. She noticed that Wiener was watching her intently and began to teach him the alphabet. Two days later, she was surprised to tell me that Wiener had learned the alphabet.
Norbert Wiener 9-year-old photo (Source: MIT Museum)
Wiener's mother, Bertha, read to him at a very young age. However, when Wiener was three years old, the roles of the two were reversed, and Wiener began to read to his mother. Leo, then a harvard professor, also taught Wiener on the floor of his study. Little Wiener loved science books, and on his third birthday he received a copy of Wood's Natural History and devoured it. When father Leo started training Wiener, he was not yet of school age.
According to Wiener's own account, his coursework at the time consisted mainly of informal courses offered by his father in his area of expertise (language and literature), including Greek and Latin classics, followed by Leo's favorite German poetry and philosophers, and the teachings of Darwin and Huxley. Wiener was not yet six years old at the time.
Despite His talent, Leo was a demanding teacher with high standards. When Wiener made mistakes, his father, Leo, would be "extremely picky and demanding." As Wiener recounts in his autobiography, The Prodigy of yesteryear (1953):
Algebra wasn't hard for me, but the way my father taught algebra was far from peaceful. Every time a mistake is made, it is immediately corrected. He would start the discussion in a relaxed, conversational tone until I made the first math mistake. Then the gentle and loving father suddenly became a blood revenge.
When Wiener was seven years old, his father Leo sent him to Peabody School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite his young age, Wiener entered the third grade as soon as he entered the school and soon advanced to the fourth grade, and he was not uncomfortable with this.
Wiener's reading skills were excellent, but surprisingly, he seemed to lack a talent for mathematics. After learning the reason for this, Wiener was tired of "regular memory practice," his father, Leo, asked Wiener to leave school and continue "radical experiments with homeschooling" for the next three years (Conway and Siegelman, 2005).
The World's Most Outstanding Boy (1906)
On October 7, 1906, the world first learned the name of Norbert Wiener. Wiener's photograph appeared on the front page of the New York World under the headline "The Most Remarkable Boy in the World."
Front page of the New York World (source unknown)
This article, which includes interviews with Wiener and his father, praises Leo's unusual approach to early childhood development:
Wiener's relationship with his father Leo
"My closest mentor and opponent."
Physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) published an article in the New York Review of Books in 2005, "The Tragic Tale of a Genius", in which he wrote:
"Despite Wiener's growing up and attempts to shed his status as a child prodigy at Tufts and Harvard, Leo's promotion of Wiener's achievements in several newspapers and popular magazines made the situation worse."
—Freeman Dyson
Norbert Wiener as a child (Credit: MIT Museum)
Wiener's father did openly advocate his educational philosophy, and in addition to articles published in the New York World, there were also articles in the Boston Evening Record, the American Journal of Pediatrics, and the American Journal. Leo Wiener "made no secret of his deliberate act of portraying Wiener and his sister as geniuses" (Heims, 1980):
"Wiener is lazy and not as studious as boys of his age."
——Leo Wiener, 1906
There is a big difference between Leo's public account and the real situation regarding the approach to Wiener's education. For example, after reading Leo's own account of how to turn a child into a genius, you will find that praising and recognizing a child's abilities is not a major part of his educational philosophy (Heims, 1980):
Some people think that Norbert, Constance, and Bertha are unusually gifted children, which is nonsense. They are not geniuses. If they are more knowledgeable than other children of the same age, the reason is that they have received different training.
Left: Leo Wiener (Source: MIT Museum). Right: Wiener mentions his father Leo on the title page of his best-selling book, The Usefulness of Man and Man (1950).
Most importantly, from Wiener's self-description, you will find that his father Leo's remarks had a certain degree of negative impact on him (Wiener, 1953):
I think my father didn't resist the temptation in the interview and retouched me and the training I received. In these interviews, he emphasized that I was essentially an ordinary boy who had only benefited from excellent training to achieve such results.
The image "created" by his father, as well as the unrecognized talent, effort and sacrifice, left a deep mark on Wiener. "It made me feel unconfident in my abilities, which I still had even without my father's urging."
"All in all, I went through the worst."
However, from the Leo interview article published in the New York Journal of the World, it is clear that Leo actually understands Wiener's talent, although he does not admit it to Wiener:
Education (1903–1913)
After his father's home education, nine-year-old Wiener entered Ayer High School in 1903 and was soon promoted:
I soon discovered that most of my knowledge belonged to the third year of high school, so at the end of that year I entered the advanced class.
After graduating from high school in 1906, Wiener's father "decided to send him to Tufts University instead of going through the pressure and risk of Harvard's entrance exams." At the time, Wiener was only 12 years old, and he continued to work diligently.
Tufts University (1906–1909)
In 1906, young Wiener entered Tufts University in Massachusetts. There he studied Greek and German, physics and mathematics, and biology:
Despite my interest in biology, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. Every year of college, I studied math... I found calculus and differential equations simple, and in the past I used to discuss the content of college mathematics with my father.
1909 University photo of Tufts University in Wiener and 1913 from Harvard University (Source: MIT Museum)
Harvard University (1909–1913)
"I'm almost 15 years old and I decided to try my PhD in biology."
After graduating from college, Wiener entered Harvard Graduate School to study zoology. This was opposed by my father, Leo, who was "extremely reluctant to agree, and he thought I should go to medical school" (Wiener, 1953). However, zoology emphasized laboratory work, and Wiener's eye disease made it difficult for him to do experiments, and zoology was somewhat difficult for him. Ultimately, his rebellion didn't last long. Soon, Wiener decided to follow his father's advice to revise philosophy.
As always, it was a decision made by my father. He thinks my grades in philosophy as an undergraduate at Tufts Hint at my true career direction. I should be a philosopher.
Wiener received a scholarship from Cornell University's School of Philosophy and transferred to Cornell University in 1910. But after an insecure and unsuitable "black year" (Wiener, 1953), Wiener returned to Harvard Graduate School in 1911.
Initially he planned to complete his Ph.D. in mathematical logic in collaboration with the philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916). But because Josiah fell ill, Wiener had to complete the task with Karl Schmidt, a former professor at Tufts University. According to Wiener's later description, Schmidt was "very young and passionate about mathematical logic". It was he who encouraged Wiener to compare Ernst Schroeder's Algebra of Relatives (1841–1902) and Whitehead with Russell's Principia Mathematica (Wiener, 1953):
There is a lot of formal work to be done on this topic, and I think they are relatively simple. But then when I studied with Russell in England, I found that I had missed almost everything that had real philosophical significance. However, my material ended up being a recognized dissertation and helped me get my PhD.
Wiener's doctoral dissertation is highly relevant to mathematics and falls into the category of formal logic. The following year (1914), the results of the paper were written into the paper A simplification in the logic of relations, which was published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In the fall of graduation, Wiener traveled to Europe to conduct postdoctoral research, hoping to eventually secure tenure-track teaching positions at prestigious universities in the United States.
Postdoctoral Research (1913–1915)
After completing his Harvard doctoral thesis, defense and graduation process, 18-year-old Wiener received a one-year travel scholarship from the school. His chosen destination was the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
University of Cambridge (1913–1914)
"Leo Wiener gave his son to Russell himself."
In September 1913, Norbert Wiener arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge. His family traveled with him, and his father, Leo, applied for a one-year academic sabbatical from Harvard University to travel with his son to Europe. As Conway & Siegelman (2005) describes, "the young Norbert Wiener crossed the doors of Trinity College, Cambridge, into the holy land of modern philosophy and new mathematical logic, followed closely by his father".
Wiener continued his philosophical studies at Cambridge University under the tutelage of Russell, one of the authors of Principles of Mathematics (the focus of Wiener's doctoral dissertation). Russell (1872–1970) was in his early forties and was one of the top philosophers in the minds of British Americans.
Russell's three-volume Principia Mathematica (published in 1910, 1912, and 1913), co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead, was greatly appreciated. The Principia Mathematica was the most complete and coherent book on the philosophy of mathematics of its time. The book is known for its rigor, such as proving 1+1 = 2 in more than 300 pages, thus laying the foundation for theory of addition to logic.
Although Wiener was raised in a harsh manner by his father, who was a Professor at Harvard, his first impression of Russell's personality was not very good, as he described in a correspondence with his father shortly afterwards:
Russell's attitude seemed cold mixed with contempt, and I felt I should be content with seeing him in class.
Russell's impression of Wiener seemed to be mutual. "Apparently, the young Norbert Wiener would not 'read data' or do philosophical research in the way Trinity College prescribes" (Conway & Siegelman, 2005).
However, like Wiener's father, Leo, Russell didn't think he was that harsh on 18-year-old Wiener. Russell praised the boy in a private article, and after reading Wiener's doctoral dissertation, Russell gave this assessment: "a good technical study." He also gave a copy of the third volume of Principia Mathematica as a gift to Wiener (Conway & Siegelman, 2005).
But Wiener's most important takeaway from Russell had nothing to do with physics or philosophy, but rather russell advising Wiener to read four papers published by physicist Albert Einstein since 1905 and use them. Wiener at the time thought that Hardy (1877–1947) had the greatest influence on him (Wiener, 1953):
Hardy's curriculum and its rigor inspired me. In all the years I've been studying math, I've never seen someone as clear-thinking, interested, and intellectually superior as Hardy. If I had to choose someone to mentor mathematical thinking, I would definitely choose Hardy.
Specifically, Wiener argues that Hardy's act of leading him to learn Lebeg points "directly led to major achievements in his early career".
University of Göttingen, Germany (1914)
After becoming more experienced, Wiener continued his visiting studies at the University of Göttingen in 1914. After a brief visit to his family in Munich, Wiener arrived at the University of Göttingen this spring. Although he spent only one semester here, this time was crucial to his future career as a mathematician. Wiener studied differential equations under the direction of David Hilbert (1862–1943). Hilbert was perhaps the most important mathematician of his time, and Wiener praised him as a "true mathematical all-rounder".
Until the outbreak of World War I in June 1914, Wiener remained in Göttingen. After the outbreak of war, he decided to return to Cambridge and continue to study philosophy with Russell.
Career (1915-)
Before being hired by MIT (Wiener has since been teaching at MIT), Wiener did a lot of odd jobs in multiple industries and cities across the United States. He officially returned to the United States in 1915 and made a brief stop in New York City, where he continued his studies of philosophy with the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) at Columbia University. He then taught philosophy at Harvard University and later apprenticed to General Electric. Later, through his father's introduction, Wiener joined the American Encyclopedia team in Albany, New York, as a contributing author. According to Wiener, he "considered himself clumsy and therefore not good at engineering" (Wiener, 1953). He also spent a brief time at the Boston Herald.
As the United States entered World War I, Wiener was eager to contribute to the war, so in 1916 he attended an officer training camp, but was never given a position. In 1917, he tried again to join the army, but was rejected due to his vision. In 1918, Wiener accepted an invitation from the mathematician Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) to study ballistics in Maryland, contributing to the war in this way:
I received an urgent call from Professor Oswald Veblen inviting me to join the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. It was my chance to devote myself to real war work, so I changed my next train to New York to Aberdeen.
Mathematician in uniform at the 1918 Aberdeen TestIng Ground, with Wiener on the far right (Source: MIT Museum).
According to Dyson's (2005) narrative, the experience at the Aberdeen Proving Ground changed Wiener. Before arriving there, Wiener was a 24-year-old math genius, but was discouraged by the failure of his first teaching position at Harvard. Upon arriving at the test site, Wiener was inspired and rejuvenated by applying what he had learned to real-world problems:
We are in a strange situation: ranks, ranks, and academic titles all play an important role, and lieutenants can call their subordinates "doctors" or obey the orders of sergeants. When we don't use the noisy manual computer "crashers", we play bridge together and use the computer to record the bridge score. Whatever we do, we always talk about mathematics.
Mathematical Achievements (1914–)
Source: MIT Museum
Of Wiener's extensive writings, the first two mathematical papers were published in 1914 in volume 17 of the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, of which the second article is now missing:
Wiener, N. (1914). “A Simplification of the Logic of Relations”. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 17, pp. 387–390.
Wiener, N. (1914). “A Contribution to the Theory of Relative Position”. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 17, pp. 441–449.
The first paper was related to mathematical logic, and according to Wiener, the article was "presented by Hardy on February 23, 1914," but "did not get Russell's approval." In this paper, Wiener proposes that "the asymmetry between two elements of an ordered pair can be achieved using an empty set". This study presents the main results of its Harvard phD thesis, demonstrating that set theory can be used to define mathematical concepts of relations, thus illustrating that relation theory does not require any particular theorems or primitive concepts.
Most of Wiener's most famous mathematical contributions were born between the ages of 25 and 50, 1921–1946. Mathematician Chatterji (1994) considers Wiener's ingenious use of Lebesgue's integral theory to be his unique achievement. Lebesgue integrals extend traditional integrals to broader categories of functions and domains.
After World War I, Wiener tried to obtain a teaching position at Harvard, but was rejected because of the anti-Semitic atmosphere at Harvard, which was often blamed on G. D. Birkhoff (1884–1944), the head of Harvard's mathematics department. In 1919, Wiener went to MIT as a lecturer. Since then, his research output has increased dramatically.
During his first five years at MIT, Wiener published 29 independent journal papers, essays, and newsletters covering different subfields of mathematics. These articles include:
Wiener, N. (1920).「A Set of Postulates for Fields」. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 21, pp. 237–246.
Wiener, N. (1921).「A New Theory of Measurement: A Study in the Logic of Mathematics」. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, pp. 181–205.
Wiener, N. (1922).「The Group of the Linear Continuum」. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, pp. 181–205.
Wiener, N. (1921).「The Isomorphisms of Complex Algebra」. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 27, pp. 443–445.
Wiener, N. (1923).「Discontinuous Boundary Conditions and the Dirichlet Problem」. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, pp. 307–314.
Wiener Process (1920-23)
While studying with Russell at Cambridge University, Wiener first became interested in Brownian motion, and Russell instructed him to read Einstein's "Year of Miracles" study. In 1905, Einstein wrote the thesis "Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhended Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" ("On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended." In a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat " ) argues that the irregular movement of pollen grains is caused by the impact of water molecules. This "irregular movement" was first observed by Robert Brown in 1827, but the phenomenon has not been formally studied mathematically.
Wiener believed that "it is a mathematical pleasure to develop probabilistic measures for sets of trajectories" and studied this phenomenon (Heims, 1980):
Example of a one-dimensional Vena process/Brownian motion.
Wiener extended Einstein's definition of Brownian motion to describe such trajectories, establishing a connection between lebeser measures (a systematic way of assigning values to subsets) and statistical mechanics. That is, Wiener provided a mathematical form for the one-dimensional curves left by Brownian motion. In honor of Wiener, this work is often referred to as the "Wiener Process". The work was published in a series of papers from 1920 to 1923:
Wiener, N. (1920).「The Mean of a Functional of Arbitrary Elements」. Annals of Mathematics 22 (2), pp. 66–72.
Wiener, N. (1921).「The Average of an Analytic Functional」. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 7 (9), pp. 253–260.
Wiener, N. (1921).「The Average of an Analytic Functional and the Brownian Movement」. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 7 (10), pp. 294–298.
Wiener, N. (1923).「Differential Space」. Journal of Mathematics and Physics 2, pp. 131–174.
Wiener, N. (1924).「The Average Value of a Functional」. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22, pp. 454–467.
According to Wiener, although these papers did not solve physical problems, they provided a robust mathematical framework that Von Neumann, Bernhard Koopman (1900–1981), and Birkhoff later used to solve the statistical mechanics problems proposed by Willard Gibbs (1839–1903).
Wiener and Max Born at the University of Göttingen in 1925 (Credit: George H. Davis, Jr., MIT Museum)
Return to Göttingen (1924–1926)
Using his research in the early 1920s, Wiener returned to Göttingen in the summer of 1924 and remained there until 1926 (in which Wiener received the Guggenheim Prize). During the Golden Age of Quantum Physics, Wiener met Von Neumann and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who were visiting students in Göttingen, and established personal ties with Von Neumann.
In the summer of 1925, Wiener presented his work to working and visiting mathematicians at the University of Göttingen, and wrote in a home letter that Hilbert considered his work "very beautiful". On his way out, Richard Courant (1888–1972), head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Göttingen, told Wiener that if he returned to Göttingen the following year, he would be offered the position of visiting professor.
Wiener–Sinchin theorem (1930)
After leaving Göttingen, Wiener began to study applied mathematics. In 1930 on the autocorrelation function, Wiener provided the correlation between the signal and its delay signal. This is the Wiener–Hintsin theorem, which states that the power spectral density Sₓₓ(f) is the Fourier transform of its autocorrelation function Rₓₓ(τ):
In the same year, the results of the study were published and Wiener was promoted to associate professor at MIT.
Wiener, N. (1930).「Generalized Harmonic Analysis」. Acta Mathematica. 55, pp. 117–258.
Left: Norbert Wiener photograph (Source: MIT Museum). Right: Table of contents of Wiener's paper Generalized Harmonic Analysis (1930).
Wiener's Tauber theorem (1932)
Although Wiener was active in the early developments of signal processing and electrical engineering in the early 1930s, he did not interrupt the publication of papers on pure mathematics, including the analysis of Lebesberg spaces. Wiener's Tauber theorem, published in 1932, provides sufficient conditions for " a linear combination of different transformations of a given function approximates an arbitrary function converging on the L₁ or L₂ series " . The results of the study are as follows:
Wiener, N. (1932).「Tabuerian Theorems」. Annals of Mathematics 33(1), pp. 1–100.
Wiener begins by describing:
"A large number of important branches of mathematics and physics focus on the asymptotic behavior of functions when parameters have great or minimal values."
Wiener's Tauber theorem deals with how to approximate such functions with greatum values. In the same year, the results of the study were published, and Wiener was promoted to professor in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
Norbert'Wiener was in MIT's office, filming at an unknown time.
Pelley–Wiener's Theorem (1934)
There are very few PhD students in the Wiener belt. In Heims (1980), one of his phD students, Norman Levinson (1912–1975), documented his work with Wiener:
Levinson was also involved in the work on the Paley–Wiener theorem, which relates the attenuation of functions or distributions at infinity to the analyticalness of the Fourier transform. The study is included in the following books:
Cybernetics (1947-)
"Information is information, neither matter nor energy.
Left: Wiener tests a dedicated correlator computer. Right: Wiener and Claude Shannon, the father of information theory (Source: MIT Museum)
Cybernetics, now synonymous with Wiener, derives in large part from Wiener's interest in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, which are common in both electrical engineering and communication theory. In a talk on the theme "Men, Machines, and the World About Them," Wiener said the cutting-edge research was the result of his contributions to the wars of the 1940s:
Two ever-converging torrents of ideas led me to cybernetics, one of which was World War II. Before World War II came to Pearl Harbor, and before we were involved in the dispute, I tried to contribute to the war.
As Wiener recounted in his speech, his first attempt at emerging theory of numerical computing did not immediately play a role in World War II, so Wiener turned to seek other directions. His second attempt was related to weapons, specifically anti-aircraft weapons:
I turned to other directions, and the hot-button issue discussed at the time was air defense. By then the Battle of Britain had already begun, and the United States appeared on the international stage as a capable nation. To defeat Germany, air defense was the key.
Now, anti-aircraft guns are already very interesting weapon types. In World War I, although anti-aircraft guns have appeared as shooting equipment, people still need to manually operate the range table to make the anti-aircraft guns fire. This means that you have to perform all the calculations when the plane flies overhead. In fact, by the time you finished calculating and were ready to fire, the plane had already flown away.
So Wiener continued to delve into it, "which brought in some very interesting mathematical theories, and some of my ideas eventually came in handy." He collaborated with Julian Bigelow (1913–2003) on the subject. "In early 1941, the two were conducting research on a blackboard in an empty classroom (2 rooms 244) on the second floor of the Department of Mathematics. Wiener and new collaborators work together to solve the fire control problem" (Conway & Siegelman, 2005):
Wiener filters (1942)
Wiener's research on anti-aircraft fire control led him to create a filter. The filter filters the input to generate an estimate of the output, which calculates a statistical estimate of an unknown signal. The filter is based on Wiener's previous research on integration and Fourier transforms. Although the study was done within the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the results were published in confidential document form. The first unclassified document describing the filter appeared in Wiener's 1949 book Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series.
After the war of 1947, Wiener was invited to participate in a conference on reconciliation and analysis in Nancy, France. The conference was organized by the French mathematical organization "Bourbaki" in collaboration with the uncles of mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983) and Benoit Mandelbrot (1925–2010), the discoverer of the Mandelberg collection. At the conference, Wiener was invited to write a manuscript on "Unifying the Mathematical Properties Found in Brownian Motion and Telecommunications Engineering Studies."
The following year, Wiener coined the new term cybernetics to denote such "teleological mechanisms" for research. The manuscript laid the groundwork for its popular scientific work Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published in 1948 by MIT Press/John Willy & Sons and critically acclaimed (Wikipedia, 2020):
"The book is beautifully written, clear and understandable, and the expression is direct. Although the content of the book is more complex, it is no less readable to the layman than that of a trained scientist if the former is willing to try to understand mathematical formulas."
- The Saturday Review (1949)
"The scope and impact of the book is unprecedented, and critics see it as an important contribution to contemporary thought."
——Philosophy of Science 22 (1955)
"One of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Cybernetics has been hailed as a "groundbreaking study" of equal importance to the work of Galileo, Malthus, Rousseau, or Mueller."
—The New York Times (1964)
Wiener's character
"He doesn't seem to know where he is."
Wiener is interviewed by Charles Romine, a journalist for cbs education program The Search (1954, credit: MIT Museum)
Wiener was extremely gifted and made extraordinary scientific contributions, but his eccentricities may be better known.
"The way he looked when he appeared alone was impressive... A thick cigar and waddling like a duck, he is such an absent-minded professor of myopia." Wiener was severely short-sighted, and the daughter of a colleague thought he was "an attractive but boyish man who everyone had to take care of him." He often slept upstairs where no one would sleep because he was snoring. In the early morning, he would walk into the wrong classroom and wander around because he couldn't see clearly" (Conway & Siegelman, 2005).
Wiener would "enthusiastically" dig his nostrils in class, without the slightest fear that it would appear to lack social etiquette.
In fact, according to the extensive records of people who interacted with or observed Wiener, he was a man of deep thinking and did not care about his surroundings:
He walked into the wrong classroom at least once and gave a lecture to a confused student with great interest.
In the collection of essays, Mathematical Conversations - Selections from the Mathematical Intelligencer, author and mathematician Steven G. Krantz (1951-) documents a similar anecdote that can be used as a supplementary proof of Wiener's style of conduct:
1961 Wiener Testimonial Party (Credit: MIT Museum)
With Wiener's permission, biographer Conway & Siegelman (2005 p. 31) traced his eccentric personality back to his postdoctoral experience at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he "saw for the first time those around him who were highly intelligent and declining aristocrats develop eccentricity into an art form". Unlike Harvard University (Wiener believes that Harvard "always hated eccentricity and personality"), Cambridge University "highly admired eccentric behavior, and even those who did not have eccentricities had to cultivate eccentricities for the sake of face". This is echoed by biographer Sylvia Nasar, who recounts the greenhouse atmosphere of MIT's mathematics department in the 1950s:
MIT alumni drive in New Hampshire while stopping to help a stocky man with a flat tire. He recognized the man as Nobert Wiener and asked if he needed help. Wiener asked if [the alumnus] knew him. The alumni replied yes, he had taken Wiener's class. "Did you pass?" Wiener asked. "Of course." "Then you can help me." Wiener said.
—Robert K. Weatherall, Vice President of the MIT Alumni Association
Of course, Professor Wiener's eccentricity also adds to his legend at MIT:
According to MIT, Wiener wrote on the math department's blackboard with both hands and furiously, solving multiple complex equations at the same time, one with one hand (Conway & Siegelman, 2005).
depression
"Norbert Wiener was a great thinker and suffered a lot."
——Benoit Mandelbrot
Wiener is good at socializing, but that doesn't mean his spiritual world is simple. When he was a child, in addition to being extremely talented, he was most often described as "serious" and "sensitive.". It is said that once he passed by the hospital and saw an incurable patient "shrouded in gloom", and even when he was a little older, when he visited a blacksmith whose toes were trampled by a horse, his heart was "filled with hatred of pain" (Conway and Siegelman, 2005).
If my son or grandson is as upset as I am, I will take him to a psychiatrist. I don't have confidence in the success of psychotherapy, but at least I hope it will bring some level of understanding and relief.
—Norbert Wiener
After reading the records of people who knew Wiener or the autobiography of Wiener himself, it is clear that he has been suffering from feelings of inferiority. This may be unrelated to the way his father, Leo, was raised, feelings that went beyond pure mathematics and permeated other parts of Wiener's life (Krantz, 2001):
Wiener is indeed very insecure. According to Nasar (1998), Wiener nervously asks if his name appears in the books people are reading:
"When he was low, he was captured by depression, which drove him to frequently express suicidal thoughts to his family and MIT colleagues."
——Nasar (1998)
"When Wiener became famous, he often asked his colleagues to find out what the rest of the MIT thought of him. When talking about people from other agencies, his first question was ,' what do they think of my work? 」
——Conway & Siegelman (2005)
According to MIT professor Paul Samuelson (1915–2009), nobel laureate economist in economics, the lack of recognition from Harvard University exacerbates the problem:
"Leaving Harvard has caused long-term psychological trauma to Norbert Wiener. His father was a Professor at Harvard University, or his mother thought that his departure from Harvard was a cruel decline in his life, which undoubtedly exacerbated his pain."
——Paul Samuelson, 1964
Wiener argues that "societal understanding of mental illness will benefit greatly from the experiences offered by new brain-like computer-like devices" (Conway & Siegelman, 2005):
Personal life
"We are not dead things that are rigid, but self-perpetuating patterns."
Wiener and his daughter Peggy playing chess (Source: MIT Museum)
In 1926, Wiener's parents arranged for him to marry Margaret Engemann, a German immigrant. Still, the duo have lived together and raised two children, Barbara and Margaret "Peggy," who live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite His insecurity, absent-mindedness, and depressive tendencies, Wiener was a good father and good friend:
In fact, there are many stories about Wiener's gentle thoughtfulness.
"Probably because of the psychological struggles he's experienced, Wiener has a strong sense of empathy for other people. While a young colleague was writing a book but could not afford a typewriter, Wiener showed up in front of his office with a royal typewriter.
According to the widow of his student Norman Levinson, in the autumn of 1933, Wiener "arranged for Levinson to spend the next school year studying advanced mathematics with Hardy in Cambridge, England, just as he did in those days", and even took care of Levinson's parents after he traveled to England:
Norbert Wiener went into the humble cottage where Norman's parents lived to comfort them. During Norman's visits to the UK, Norbert often came to visit and talk to them on Saturdays. The subject of the conversation had nothing to do with Wiener's theorem, but with the trivia of England, the landlord, afternoon tea, and the high table."
——Beech Levinson
Wiener and his wife Margaret, daughters "Peggy", Barbara, and son-in-law Gordon Raisbeck (Source: MIT Museum).
Died (1964)
On March 18, 1964, Norbert Wiener died of a heart attack in Stockholm, Sweden, at the age of 69. He was there to give a lecture at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. When the news of Wiener's death reached MIT:
Work was suspended and people gathered to share the news and their memories of Wiener, who lowered the flag to half-mast in honor of Professor Wiener, who had been strolling the corridors of MIT for 45 years.
——Excerpt, Dark Hero of the Information Age by Conway & Siegelman (2005)
Original link: https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-absent-minded-father-of-cybernetics-norbert-wiener-2a0b66aa6b4b