Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Wiener is considered the father of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.

Biography

(taken from Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener - Father of Cybernetics, listed below)

Born on the doorstep of the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener was a descendant of Eastern European rabbis, scholars, and, purportedly, of the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. He entered college at eleven, received his Ph.D. from Harvard at eighteen, apprenticed with renowned European mathematicians, and, in 1919, joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His early mathematical work solved practical problems in electronics theory that engineers had been wrestling with for decades. In the 1920s, he worked on the design of the first modern computer, and during World War II, he helped create the first intelligent automated machines. Wiener's wartime vision grew into a new interdisciplinary science of communication, computation, and automatic control, spanning the forefronts of engineering, biology, and the social sciences. His ideas attracted an eclectic group of scientists and scholars: computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Wiener named his new science "cybernetics"—from the Greek word for steersman. His 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine set off a scientific and technological revolution. In less than a decade, cybernetics transformed the day-to-day labors of workers in every industry and unleashed a flood of dazzling devices on postwar society. Wiener gave the word "feedback" its modern meaning and introduced it into popular parlance. He was the first to perceive the essence of the new stuff called "information." He worked with eminent biologists and neurophysiologists to crack the communication codes of the human nervous system, and with the engineers who incorporated those codes into the circuits of the first programmable "electronic brains." Wiener spoke and wrote passionately about rising threats to human values, freedoms, and spirituality that were still decades in the offing. His efforts won him the National Book Award and the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific award. Yet, even as his new ideas were taking hold in America and worldwide, Wiener's visionary science was foundering. By the late 1950s, cybernetics was being superseded by the specialized technical fields and subdisciplines it had spawned, and Wiener himself wound up on the sidelines of his own revolution. his moral stands were rejected by his peers and a gadget-happy consumer public, and his grim predictions were dismissed by many as the doomsaying ofan aging, eccentric egghead. He died suddenly, at age 69, on a trip to Europe in 1964, even as so many of the things he had predicted were coming to pass.

Works

Books

Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, Log.

• Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Paris: Hermann & Cie, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, and New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948, 194 pp; MIT Press and Wiley, 2nd ed., 1961, 212 pp; 1965, PDF; 1980. Reviews: Dubarle (1948, FR), Littauer (1949), MacColl (1950). In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France and organized by the bourbakist mathematician, Szolem Mandelbrojt. During this stay in France Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism ‘cybernetics’ into his scientific theory. According to Pierre De Latil, MIT Press tried their best to prevent the publication of the book in France, since Wiener, then professor at MIT, was bound to them by contract. As a representative of Hermann Editions, M. Freymann managed to find a compromise and the French publisher won the rights to the book. Having lived together in Mexico, Freymann and Wiener were friends and it is Freymann who is supposed to have suggested that Wiener write this book. Benoît Mandelbrot and Walter Pitts proofread the manuscript. [1]
  • Cibernetica. Controllo e comunicazione nell’animale e nella macchina, Milan: Bompiani, 1953. (Italian)
  • N. Viner (Н. Винер), Kibernetika, ili upravlenie i svyaz v zhivotnom i mashine [Кибернетика, или Управление и связь в животном и машине], Moscow: Sovetskoe radio [Советское радио], trans. G.N. Povarov, Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1958, 216 pp; 1963; 2nd ed., 1968. (Russian)
  • Cibernética, trans. Miguel Mora Hidalgo, Madrid: Guadiana, 1960, 314 pp; 1971. (Spanish)
  • Kybernetik. Regelung und Nachrichtenübertragung in Lebewesen und Maschine, rororo, 1968; Econ, 1992. (German)
  • Cybernetyka, czyli sterowanie i komunikacja w zwierzęciu i maszynie, Warsaw: PWN, 1971, 261 pp. (Polish)
  • Cibernética ou controle e comunicação no animal e na maquina, São Paulo: Poligono, 1970. (Portuguese)
  • Cibernética o el control y comunicación en animales y máquinas, trans. Francisco Martín, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1985, 266 pp; 1998; 2002, 150 pp. (Spanish)

• Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1949; New York: Wiley; London: Chapman & Hall, PDF.

The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950.

• The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1950; 2nd ed., 1954; London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1954; New York: Avon Books, 1967; New York: Da Capo Press, 1988; London: Free Association Books, 1989.
  • Cybernétique et société, Union Générale d'Éditions, 1952; 1971. (French)
  • Mensch und Menschmaschine, Frankfurt am Main: Metzner, 1952; 4th ed., 1972. (German)
  • Cibernética e sociedade: o uso humano de seres humanos, trans. José Paulo Paes, São Paulo: Cultrix, 1954; 2nd ed., 1968, 190 pp. (Portuguese)
  • Kibernetika i obshchestvo [Кибернетика и общество], trans. E.G. Panfilov, Moscow: IIL, 1958, 200 pp. (Russian)
  • Cybernetyka i społeczeństwo, Warsaw: KiW, Warszawa 1960, 236 pp; Cybernetyka a społeczeństwo, 2nd ed., Warsaw: KiW, 1961, 217 pp. (Polish)
  • Introduzione alla cibernetica. L’uso umano degli esseri umani, trans. Dario Persiani, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1966, 229 pp; 3rd ed., 1970, 240 pp; 1982; 2012, 234 pp. (Italian). Review.
  • Ihmisestä, koneista, kielestä, trans. Pertti Jotuni, Helsinki: WS, 1969. (Finnish)
  • Cybernética y sociedad, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. (Spanish)
  • Cybernética y sociedad, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984. (Spanish)

• Time and organization. (Second Fawley Foundation Lecture), University of Southampton, 1955.

• The theory of prediction. Modern mathematics for the engineer, ed. E. F. Beckenbach, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.

• Nonlinear problems in random theory, Cambridge, Mass./ New York: The MIT Press and Wiley, 1958; 1959.

• The tempter, New York: Random House, 1959.

• Cybernetics, Second edition, New York: The MIT Press and Wiley, 1961.

• Time series, Wiley paperbacks/The MIT Press, 1964. [reprint under another name Sur la théorie de la prévision statistique et du filtrage des ondes, Analyse Harmonique, Colloques Internationaux du CNRS, Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1949, No. 15, pp. 67-74. Original in (French)]

• with J. P. Schadé (eds.), The Cybernetics of the Nervous System, Elsevier Pub. Company, 1965, 425 pp., PDF, PDF.

• God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, MIT Press, 1966. Log
  • Dumnezeu şi Golem, S.A. Comentariu asupra cîtorva puncte de contact între cibernetică şi religie, trans. Edmond Nicolau and Lucia Nasta, Bucharest: Ştiinţifică, 1969, PDF, PDF, IA. (Romanian)
  • God & Golem Inc. Sur quelques points de collision entre la cybernétique et la religion, trans. Christophe Romana and Patricia Farazzi, intro Charles Mopsik, Paris: L’Éclat, 2015. (French)

• Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas, intro. Steve Joshua Heims, MIT Press, 1993, 185 pp. Log

Autobiography

• Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, MA: MIT Press; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1965.
• I am a Mathematician. The later life of a prodigy, Doubleday/London: Gollancz; New York: Garden City, 1956.

Collected writings

• Selected Papers of Norbert Wiener, Expository papers by Y. W. Lee, Norman Levinson, and W. T. Martin, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press & SIAM, 1964.

Bibliography

• "Bibliography of Norbert Wiener", Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 72:1, Part 2 (1966), pp 135-145.

Literature

• Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark hero of the information age: in search of Norbert Wiener the father of cybernetics, New York: Basic Books, 2005, PDF.

See also

• Cybernetics

Links

• http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc22.html
• Wiener at Wikipedia