Wiener is credited as being one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms, that could possibly be simulated by machines and was an important early step towards the development of modernartificial intelligence.[5]
He met his paternal grandfather on his father's side—Solomon Wiener, whom he describes as a scholarlyjournalist incapable of keeping the family together—only once inNew York.[6] Despite this, he was impressed by his grandfather's efforts to replaceYiddish in his lived environment withGerman.[6] Solomon was born inKrotoschin, but married his father's mother—who came from a family of Jewishtanners—before settling inByelostok where his father was born in 1862.[6] He was told they had originally been minornobles inRussia, such that when the RussianTzar came to visit Byelostok it was his grandmother's house which was selected as a place of temporary residence.[6]
His paternal grandmother's side of the family was very different to his father's side, and Wiener suggests that his father developed "solid,business-like habits that gave my father a firm footing in life",[7] which made him a better custodian of the family than his grandfather.[7] Nonetheless, his father still displayed an idealist streak.[7] By the age of thirteen and because of their family situation—and because according to Wiener there is a tendency within the Jewish community to giveadolescent boy the responsibility of men—his father Leo had begun to support his family as aprivate tutor.[7] Due to the German bias of his grandfather, Wiener's father went to aLutheran school and learntseveral languages.[7]
His father later left theMinskGymnasium forWarsaw inPoland, where Wiener claims his father developed good relations with hisPolish schoolmates—so much so his father became privy to the undergroundPolish resistance movement.[8] His father became a contemporary ofZamenhof, the inventor ofEsperanto, to which Wiener claims: "my father was one of the first to study the new artificial language".[8] His father later went to theUniversity of Warsaw to studymedicine, although could not handle the profession so went to study at the Polytechnicum inBerlin to studyengineering.[9] Relatives in Berlin with connections toMendelssohn bank tried to get his father to pursue a career in banking, but his father declined.[10] Instead, his father had begun to develop aTolstoyan ethic which was reinforced through his attendance of ahumanitarian student meeting, which would eventually lead him coming to theUnited States as well as Wiener'svegetarianism.[10] Wiener however expressed resentment over his father'sdogmatism over this later point during his childhood, which in his view lead toemotional abuse by his father towards himself.[10]
However, assuming for the sake of argument that all these events had occurred in their due sequence, I should still not have been brought up as a vegetarian, should not have lived in a house in which I was surrounded by horrible and hair raising vegetarian tracts concerning cruelty to animals, and should not have been subjected to the overwhelming precept and example of my father in such matters.
His father planned to set up acommune inCentral America based on these ideas.[10] However, his companion abandoned him leaving him on a ship toHartlepool.[10] His father then went toLiverpool, thenHavana and thenNew Orleans—picking up both onEnglish andSpanish during his trip.[10] Eventually, his father decided to teach languages and went intoPhilology.[11] Later meeting Wiener's mother, Bertha Kahn who was the daughter of a department—Henry Kahn—store owner in St. Joseph's,Missouri.[12]
His maternal grandfather was aGerman Jewish immigrant fromRhineland. His wife's maiden name was Ellinger, who had settled in the United States a few generations beforehand.[13] He notes that his maternal grandmother's mother was not Jewish, and suggests that while women in that side of the family tended to marry inside theJewish community, men from that side of the family tended to marryGentiles.[13] The family also could trace its roots toAmerican South.[13] He notes that many from this side of the family men tended to leave some "career of impeccablepropriety by suddenly leaving his family and taking to thegreat open spaces".[14] With rumours that one family member ended up becoming aWesternBandit and was shot trying to evade capture.[14] In his autobiography, Wiener contrasted themelting pot culture that he was bought up in and contextualised his and his families experience as compared to the more socially homogeneousOld American culture that had been predominant before.[14] He saw this culture as offering greater freedom and opportunity compared to theEuropeanSerfdom that was found for many inEastern Europe.[14]
He writes of his youth: "Child as I was, I absorbed a real understanding of many things, and my childish point of view is not totally devoid of significance".[15] Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was seven years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home. In his autobiography, Norbert described his father as calm and patient, unless he (Norbert) failed to give a correct answer, at which his father would lose his temper.[16]
In "The Theory of Ignorance", a paper he wrote at the age of 10, he disputed "man’s presumption in declaring that his knowledge has no limits", arguing that all human knowledge "is based on an approximation", and acknowledging "the impossibility of being certain of anything."[17]
He graduated fromAyer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, and Wiener then enteredTufts College. He was awarded aBA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies ofzoology atHarvard. In 1910 he transferred toCornell to study philosophy. He graduated in 1911 at 17 years of age.[18]
The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies. Back at Harvard, Wiener became influenced byEdward Vermilye Huntington, whose mathematical interests ranged from axiomatic foundations to engineering problems. Harvard awarded Wiener aPhD in June 1913, when he was only 19 years old, for a dissertation onmathematical logic (a comparison of the work ofErnst Schröder with that ofAlfred North Whitehead andBertrand Russell), supervised by Karl Schmidt, the essential results of which were published asWiener (1914). He was one of the youngest to achieve such a feat. In that dissertation, he was the first to state publicly thatordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementaryset theory. Hencerelations can be defined by set theory, thus the theory of relations does not require any axioms or primitive notions distinct from those of set theory. In 1921,Kazimierz Kuratowski proposed a simplification of Wiener's definition of ordered pairs, and that simplification has been in common use ever since. It is
In 1914, Wiener traveled to Europe, to be taught byBertrand Russell andG. H. Hardy atCambridge University, and byDavid Hilbert andEdmund Landau at theUniversity of Göttingen. At Göttingen he also attended three courses withEdmund Husserl "one on Kant's ethical writings, one on the principles of Ethics, and the seminar on Phenomenology." (Letter to Russell, c. June or July, 1914). During 1915–1916, he taught philosophy at Harvard, then was an engineer forGeneral Electric and wrote for theEncyclopedia Americana. Wiener was briefly a journalist for theBoston Herald, where he wrote a feature story on the poor labor conditions for mill workers inLawrence, Massachusetts, but he was fired soon afterwards for his reluctance to write favorable articles about a politician the newspaper's owners sought to promote.[19]
Although Wiener eventually became a staunch pacifist, he eagerly contributed to the war effort in World War I. In 1916, withAmerica's entry into the war drawing closer, Wiener attended a training camp for potential military officers but failed to earn a commission. One year later Wiener again tried to join the military, but the government again rejected him due to his poor eyesight. In the summer of 1918,Oswald Veblen invited Wiener to work onballistics at theAberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.[20] Living and working with other mathematicians strengthened his interest in mathematics. However, Wiener was still eager to serve in uniform and decided to make one more attempt to enlist, this time as a common soldier. Wiener wrote in a letter to his parents, "I should consider myself a pretty cheap kind of a swine if I were willing to be an officer but unwilling to be a soldier."[21] This time the army accepted Wiener into its ranks and assigned him, by coincidence, to a unit stationed at Aberdeen, Maryland. World War I ended just days after Wiener's return to Aberdeen and Wiener was discharged from the military in February 1919.[22]
Norbert Wiener was regarded as a semi-legendary figure at MIT.Norbert (standing) and Margaret Wiener (sitting) at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians, Zurich 1932
Wiener was unable to secure a permanent position at Harvard, a situation he attributed largely toanti-Semitism at the university and in particular the antipathy of Harvard mathematicianG. D. Birkhoff.[23] He was also rejected for a position at theUniversity of Melbourne. AtW. F. Osgood's suggestion, Wiener was hired as an instructor of mathematics atMIT, where, after his promotion to professor, he spent the remainder of his career. For many years his photograph was prominently displayed in theInfinite Corridor and often used in giving directions, but by 2017 it had been removed.[24]
In 1926, Wiener's parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann; they had two daughters. His sister, Constance (1898–1973), married mathematicianPhilip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener's niece, married mathematicianVáclav E. Beneš.[25] Norbert Wiener's sister, Bertha (1902–1995), married the botanistCarroll William Dodge.
Many tales, perhaps apocryphal, were told of Norbert Wiener at MIT, especially concerning his absent-mindedness. It was said that he returned home once to find his house empty. He inquired of a neighborhood girl the reason, and she said that the family had moved elsewhere that day. He thanked her for the information and she replied, "It's ok, Daddy, Mommy sent me to get you".[26]Asked about the story, Wiener's daughter reportedly asserted that "he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened ..."[27]
In the run-up toWorld War II (1939–45) Wiener became a member of theChina Aid Society and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.[28] (Wiener had served as a visiting lecturer atTsing-Hua University in 1935-1936.[29]) He was interested in placing scholars such asYuk-Wing Lee andAntoni Zygmund who had lost their positions.[30]
In 1941, Wiener accepted an appointment with theNational Defense Research Committee at the invitation ofVannevar Bush.[31] Assigned to work with the NDRC's Fire Control committee, his work on the automatic aiming and firing ofanti-aircraft guns caused Wiener to investigateinformation theory independently ofClaude Shannon and to invent theWiener filter.[32] (The now-standard practice of modeling an information source as a random process—in other words, as a variety of noise—is due to Wiener.) Initially his anti-aircraft work led him to write, withArturo Rosenblueth and his research assistantJulian Bigelow, the 1943 article 'Behavior, Purpose and Teleology', which was published inPhilosophy of Science. Subsequently his anti-aircraft work led him to formulatecybernetics.[33][34][32] Wiener left the NDRC when his contract ended in 1943.[32]
After the war, his fame helped MIT to recruit a research team incognitive science, composed of researchers inneuropsychology and the mathematics andbiophysics of the nervous system, includingWarren Sturgis McCulloch andWalter Pitts. These men later made pioneering contributions tocomputer science andartificial intelligence. Soon after the group was formed, Wiener suddenly ended all contact with its members, mystifying his colleagues. This emotionally traumatized Pitts, and led to his career decline. In their biography of Wiener,Conway andSiegelman suggest that Wiener's wife Margaret, who detested McCulloch'sbohemian lifestyle, engineered the breach.[35]
Patrick D. Wall speculated that after the publication ofCybernetics, Wiener asked McCulloch for some physiological facts about the brain that he could then theorize. McCulloch told him "a mixture of what was known to be true and what McCulloch thought should be". Wiener then theorized it, went to a physiology congress, and was shot down. Wiener was convinced that McCulloch had set him up.[36]
Wiener later helped develop the theories of cybernetics,robotics, computer control, andautomation. He discussed the modeling of neurons withJohn von Neumann, and in a letter from November 1946 von Neumann presented his thoughts in advance of a meeting with Wiener.[37]
Wiener always shared his theories and findings with other researchers, and credited the contributions of others. These includedSoviet researchers and their findings. Wiener's acquaintance with them caused him to be regarded with suspicion during theCold War. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential inIndia, whose government he advised during the 1950s.
After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue ofThe Atlantic Monthly[38] 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 beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the bookJohn Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.[39]
He continued his collaborations with Rosenblueth, visiting Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Cardiología (National Institute of Cardiology) at the latter's invitation beginning in 1945. He wrote much ofCybernetics while in residence there.[40] Rosenblueth and Wiener subsequently received a five-year grant from theRockefeller Foundation to support their collaboration in Mexico and at MIT.[41] Together, they developed "the first mathematical model of circus movement reentry" in 1946.[42]
In 1926 Wiener married Margaret Engemann, an assistant professor of modern languages atJuniata College.[46] They had two daughters.[47]
Wiener admitted in his autobiographyI Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy to abusingbenzadrine throughout his life without being fully aware of its dangers.[48]
Wiener died in March 1964, aged 69, inStockholm, from a heart attack. Wiener and his wife are buried at the Vittum Hill Cemetery inSandwich, New Hampshire.
Wiener was a Plenary Speaker of theICM in 1936 at Oslo and in 1950 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wiener won theBôcher Memorial Prize in 1933 and theNational Medal of Science in 1963, presented by President Johnson at a White House Ceremony in January, 1964, shortly before Wiener's death.
Robert A. Heinlein named a spaceship after him in his 1957 novelCitizen of the Galaxy, a "Free Trader" ship called theNorbert Wiener mentioned in Chapter 14.
TheNorbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park is devoted to the scientific and mathematical legacy of Norbert Wiener. TheNWC website highlights the research activities of the center. Further, each year the Norbert Wiener Center hosts the February Fourier Talks, a two-day national conference displaying advances in pure and applied harmonic analysis in industry, government, and academia.
Wiener was an early studier ofstochastic and mathematicalnoise processes, contributing work relevant toelectronic engineering,electronic communication, andcontrol systems. It was Wiener's idea to model a signal as if it were an exotic type of noise, giving it a sound mathematical basis. The example often given to students is that English text could be modeled as a random string of letters and spaces, where each letter of the alphabet (and the space) has an assigned probability. But Wiener dealt with analog signals, where such a simple example doesn't exist. Wiener's early work on information theory and signal processing was limited to analog signals, and was largely forgotten with the development of the digital theory.[51]
In the mathematical field of probability, the "Wiener sausage" is a neighborhood of the trace of aBrownian motion up to a timet, given by taking all points within a fixed distance of Brownian motion. It can be visualized as a cylinder of fixed radius the centerline of which is Brownian motion.
For signal processing, theWiener filter is afilter proposed by Wiener during the 1940s and published in 1942 as a classified document, which was funded by theNational Defense Research Committee. Its purpose is to reduce the amount ofnoise present in a signal by comparison with an estimate of the desired noiseless signal. Wiener developed the filter at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to predict the position of German bombers from radar reflections. What emerged was a mathematical theory of great generality – a theory for predicting the future as best one can on the basis of incomplete information about the past. It was a statistical theory that included applications that did not, strictly speaking, predict the future, but only tried to remove noise. It made use of Wiener's earlier work onintegral equations andFourier transforms.[53][54]
Wiener studiedpolynomial chaos, a key piece of which is the Hermite-Laguerre expansion. This was developed in detail inNonlinear Problems in Random Theory.
Wiener applied Hermite-Laguerre expansion to nonlinear system identification and control. Specifically, a nonlinear system can be identified by inputting a white noise process and computing the Hermite-Laguerre expansion of its output. The identified system can then be controlled.[55][56]
Wiener took a great interest in the mathematical theory ofBrownian motion (named afterRobert Brown) proving many results now widely known, such as the non-differentiability of the paths. Consequently, the one-dimensional version of Brownian motion was named theWiener process. It is the best known of theLévy processes,càdlàg stochastic processes with stationary statisticallyindependent increments, and occurs frequently in pure and applied mathematics, physics and economics (e.g. on the stock-market).
ThePaley–Wiener theorem relates growth properties ofentire functions onCn and Fourier transformation of Schwartz distributions of compact support.
TheWiener–Khinchin theorem, (also known as theWiener – Khintchine theorem and theKhinchin – Kolmogorov theorem), states that the power spectral density of a wide-sense-stationary random process is the Fourier transform of the corresponding autocorrelation function.
Anabstract Wiener space is a mathematical object inmeasure theory, used to construct a "decent", strictly positive and locally finite measure on an infinite-dimensional vector space. Wiener's original construction only applied to the space of real-valued continuous paths on the unit interval, known asclassical Wiener space. Leonard Gross provided the generalization to the case of a generalseparableBanach space.
The notion of a Banach space itself was discovered independently by both Wiener andStefan Banach at around the same time.[57]
Due to his ancestry,Judaism played a significant role in shaping his character and sense of self. While neither his father nor Wiener were religious, he credits the Jewish social and cultural structure in fostering certain aspects of his development.[58] He writes: "The Jews seem to me primarily a community and a social entity although most of them have been members of a religion as well".[58] Even with the increasedrapprochement between Jewish and non-Jewish communities, he notes that particular facets of Jewish life and culture have persisted.[58]
Jewishfamily structures are described by Wiener as being closer than their European and American peers, from which religious,racial prejudice and minority prejudice has had an effect historically "modified their psychology and their attitude toward life".[58] He believes that the emphasis and encouragement ofscholarly pursuits in Judaism and community structures—as compared withChristianity historically—meant that biological and cultural traits tended to solidify over time as compared to Christianity where there were greater rates of diffusion.[7]
Let me insert here a word or two about the Jewish family structure which is not irrelevant to the Jewish tradition of learning. At all times, the young learned man, and especially the rabbi, whether or not he had an ounce of practical judgment and was able to make a good career for himself in life, was always a match for the daughter of the rich merchant.
Because of such tendencies within Jewish culture, this meant scholars were more likely to have larger families which—in his view, which according to Wiener was also shared by his fellow collegiate and friendJ. B. S. Haldane—amplified certain biological and cultural traits within the Jewish community.[7] He expressed ambivilance on issues related to Jewishnationalism andZionism, and distanced the Jewish character from such manifestations.[58] He did not see Jewishidentity as resting on such institutions:[58]
I am saying nothing about Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism, for the Jews are much older than any movements of this sort which have amounted to more than literary and ritual conventions, and might well continue to exist even though the new state of Israel succumbs or gives way to other manifestations of nationalism.
While his family had a tradition of claiming descendance fromMoses Maimonides—praising their emphasis onsecularlearning—he was more certain of being descended fromAqiba Eger who—whilst being one of the greatesttalmudic authorities according to Wiener—opposed it.[6]
The song "Dedicated to Norbert Wiener" appears as the second track on the 1980 albumWhy? by G.G. Tonet (Luigi Tonet), released on the ItalianIt Why label.[61]
He is mentioned inDan Simmon’s science fiction novelHyperion when discussing artificial intelligence and God.
1966,Generalized Harmonic Analysis and Tauberian Theorems. MIT Press.
1993,Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas; This was written in 1954 but Wiener abandoned the project at the editing stage and returned his advance. MIT Press published it posthumously in 1993.
Wiener's papers are collected in the following works:
1976–84,The Mathematical Work of Norbert Wiener. Masani P (ed) 4 vols, Camb. Mass. (MIT Press). This contains a complete collection of Wiener's mathematical papers with commentaries, in the following volumes: Vol. 1,Mathematical philosophy and foundations; potential theory; Brownian movement, Wiener integrals, ergodic and chaos theories, turbulence and statistical mechanics (ISBN0262230704); Vol. 2,Generalized harmonic analysis and Tauberian theory, classical harmonic and complex analysis (ISBN0262230925); Vol. 3,The Hopf-Wiener integral equation; Prediction and filtering; Quantum mechanics and relativity; Miscellaneous mathematical papers (ISBN0262231077); and Vol. 4,Cybernetics, science, and society; Ethics, aesthetics, and literary criticism; Book reviews and obituaries. (ISBN0262231239)
Fiction:
1959,The Tempter. Random House (onOliver Heaviside's invention for lower distortion on telegraph lines and his fight withAT&T for the proper recognition of his analysis)[2](pp249–252)
^"The Beginnings of AI Research". AI Research.world-information.org. January 11, 2019.Archived from the original on January 11, 2019. RetrievedJanuary 11, 2019.
^abcWiener, Norbert (2018b). "The Proper Missourians".Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 23–28.doi:10.7551/mitpress/11597.003.0009.ISBN9780262347051.
^abWiener, Norbert (2018a). "A Russian Irishman in Kansas City".Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 11–22.doi:10.7551/mitpress/11597.003.0008.ISBN9780262347051.
^McCavitt, Mary Jane (September 2, 2009).Guide to the Papers of Norbert Wiener(PDF) (Report). Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. p. 15. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on November 12, 2015. RetrievedMarch 20, 2016.
^Letters to Norbert Wiener inJohn von Neumann: Selected Letters, edited by Miklós Rédei, inHistory of Mathematics, Volume 27, jointly published by the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society, 2005
^Wiener, Norbert (January 1947)."A Scientist Rebels".Atlantic Monthly. p. 46.Archived from the original on October 26, 2018. RetrievedOctober 26, 2018.
^Heims, Steve Joshua (1980).John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies. Cambridge:MIT Press.ISBN978-0262081054.
^John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Steve Joshua Heims, MIT Press, 1980, p.183
^Wiener, Norbert (1949) [1942].Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series. MIT Press.
Originally published as a classified document in 1942
^Brick, Donald B. (March 1968). "On the applicability of Wiener's canonical expansions".IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics.4 (1):29–38.doi:10.1109/TSSC.1968.300185.ISSN0536-1567.
Bluma, Lars (2005).Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg: eine historische Fallstudie zur Verbindung von Wissenschaft, Technik und Gesellschaft (Ph.D.). Münster.ISBN3-8258-8345-0.OCLC60744372.
"Norbert Wiener 1894–1964".Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.72 (1 Part 2). 1966.doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1966-11450-7. Volume 72, issue 1, part 2 of the Bulletin of the American Math Society is a special issue that features a number of articles about Wiener.
