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 also 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.

Biography

Wiener was the first child of Leo Wiener, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, and Bertha Kahn, of German-Jewish descent. Employing teaching 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. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo 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, an 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.

In 1926, Wiener's parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann, who was not Jewish; they had two daughters.

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 a research team in cognitive science, made up of 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 the group was formed, Wiener broke off all contact with its members. Speculation still flourishes as to why this split occurred.

Wiener went on to break new ground in cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He shared his theories and findings with other researchers, and credited the contributions of others. These included Soviet researchers and their findings. Wiener's connections with them placed him under 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. 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).

Awards and honors

• Wiener won the Bôcher Prize in 1933 and the National Medal of Science in 1963 (Presented by President Johnson at a White House Ceremony in January 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 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.

See also

• Wiener equation
• Wiener filter
• Wiener process
• Wiener's tauberian theorem
• Paley–Wiener theorem
• Wiener-Khinchin theorem
• Abstract Wiener space

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.
• 1930, Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (known during the war as the yellow peril). MIT Press.
• 1948, Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• 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, . 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:

• From The Cybernetics Society Publications of Norbert Wiener

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.

External links

• O'Connor, John J; Edmund F. Robertson "Norbert Wiener". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.  
• Norbert Wiener at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

•  • [ e] General subfields and scientists in Cybernetics
subfields	PolycontexturalitySecond-order cyberneticsCatastrophe theoryConnectionismControl theoryDecision theoryInformation theorySemioticsSynergeticsBiological cyberneticsBiomedical cyberneticsBioroboticsComputational neuroscienceHomeostasisMedical cyberneticsNeuro cyberneticsSociocyberneticsEmergenceArtificial intelligence
related subjects	Game theory Sociology Political Science Behavioral psychology

•  • [ e] Global structure in Systems, Systems sciences and Systems scientists
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Fields of theory	Chaos theory Complex systems Control theory Cybernetics Holism in science Sociotechnical systems theory Systems biology Systems dynamics Systems ecology Systems engineering Systems theory Systems science
Systems scientists	Russell L. Ackoff William Ross Ashby Gregory Bateson Ludwig von Bertalanffy Kenneth E. Boulding C. West Churchman Heinz von Foerster Charles Franois Jay Wright Forrester Ralph W. Gerard Debora Hammond George Klir Niklas Luhmann Humberto Maturana Donella Meadows Mihajlo D. Mesarovic Howard T. Odum Talcott Parsons Ilya Prigogine Anatol Rapoport Francisco Varela John N. Warfield 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