Norbert Wiener

Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society. His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and others.

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, an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.

Biography

Family and youth

Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Germany, respectively. Through his father, he was related to Maimonides, the famous 12th century rabbi, philosopher and physician from al-Andalus, as well as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837.

He met his paternal grandfather —Solomon Wiener, whom he describes as a scholarly journalist incapable of keeping the family together—only once in New York. Despite this, he was impressed by his grandfather's efforts to replace Yiddish in his lived environment with German. Solomon was born in Krotoschin, but married his wife—who came from a family of Jewish tanners—before settling in Byelostok where Wiener's father was born in 1862. Wiener was told they had originally been minor nobles in Russia, such that when the Russian Tzar came to visit Byelostok it was his grandmother's house which was selected as a place of temporary residence.

His paternal grandmother's side of the family was very different to his grandfather's side, and Wiener suggests that his father developed "solid, business-like habits that gave my father a firm footing in life", which made him a better custodian of the family than his grandfather. Nonetheless, his father still displayed an idealist streak. 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 give adolescent boys the responsibilities of men—his father Leo had begun to support his family as a private tutor. Due to the German bias of his grandfather, Wiener's father went to a Lutheran school and learnt several languages.

His father later left the Minsk Gymnasium for Warsaw in Poland, where Wiener claims his father developed good relations with his Polish schoolmates—so much so that his father became privy to the underground Polish resistance movement. His father became a contemporary of Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, to which Wiener claims: "my father was one of the first to study the new artificial language". His father later went to the University of Warsaw to study medicine, although could not handle the profession so went to study at the Polytechnicum in Berlin to study engineering. Relatives in Berlin with connections to Mendelssohn bank tried to get his father to pursue a career in banking, but his father declined. Instead, his father had begun to develop a Tolstoyan ethic which was reinforced through his attendance of a humanitarian student meeting, which would eventually led to him emigrating to the United States, as well as Wiener's vegetarianism. Wiener, however, expressed resentment over his father's dogmatism over this later point during his childhood, which in his view led to emotional abuse from his father.

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 a commune in Central America based on these ideas. However, his companion abandoned him, leaving him on a ship to Hartlepool. His father then went to Liverpool, Havana and New Orleans—picking up both on English and Spanish during his trip. Eventually, his father decided to teach languages and went into Philology. He later met Wiener's mother Bertha Kahn, the daughter of department store owner Henry Kahn, in St. Joseph, Missouri.

His maternal grandfather was a German Jewish immigrant from Rhineland. His wife, whose maiden name was Ellinger, had settled in the United States a few generations beforehand. 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 the Jewish community, men from that side of the family tended to marry Gentiles. The family could also trace its roots to American South. He notes that many men from this side of the family tended to leave some "career of impeccable propriety by suddenly leaving his family and taking to the great open spaces", with rumours that one family member ended up becoming a Western bandit and was shot trying to evade capture. In his autobiography, Wiener contrasted the melting pot culture that he was brought up in with the more socially homogeneous Old American culture that had been predominant before. He saw this culture as offering greater freedom and opportunity compared to the serfdom that was found for many in Eastern Europe.

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". 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.

In "The Theory of Ignorance", a paper Wiener 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."

Wiener graduated from Ayer High School in 1906 at age 11, at which point he entered Tufts College, being awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14. He began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard, before transferring to Cornell in 1910 to study philosophy. He graduated in 1911 at 17 years of age.

Harvard and World War I

The next year, he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies. Back at Harvard, Wiener became influenced by Edward Vermilye Huntington, whose mathematical interests ranged from axiomatic foundations to engineering problems. Harvard awarded Wiener a PhD in June 1913, when he was only 19 years old, for a dissertation on mathematical logic (a comparison of the work of Ernst Schröder with that of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell), supervised by Karl Schmidt, the essential results of which were published as Wiener (1914). He was one of the youngest to achieve such a feat. In that dissertation, he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory. Hence relations 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 ${\displaystyle \left(x,y\right)=\{\left\{x\right\},\left\{x,y\right\}\}.}$

In 1914, Wiener traveled to Europe, to be taught by Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and by David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. At Göttingen he also attended three courses with Edmund 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 for General Electric and wrote for the Encyclopedia Americana. Wiener was briefly a journalist for the Boston Herald, where he wrote a feature story on the poor labor conditions for mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but he was fired soon afterwards for his reluctance to write favorable articles about a politician the newspaper's owners sought to promote.

Although Wiener eventually became a staunch pacifist, he eagerly contributed to the war effort in World War I. In 1916, with America'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 on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. 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." 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.

After the war

Wiener was unable to secure a permanent position at Harvard, a situation he attributed largely to anti-Semitism at the university and in particular the antipathy of Harvard mathematician G. D. Birkhoff. He was also rejected for a position at the University of Melbourne. At W. F. Osgood's suggestion, Wiener was hired as an instructor of mathematics at MIT, where, after his promotion to professor, he spent the remainder of his career. For many years his photograph was prominently displayed in the Infinite Corridor and often used in giving directions, but by 2017 it had been removed.

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; they had two daughters. His sister, Constance (1898–1973), married mathematician Philip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener's niece, married mathematician Václav E. Beneš. Wiener's sister Bertha (1902–1995) married the botanist Carroll 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". 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 ..."

In the run-up to World War II (1939–45) Wiener became a member of the China Aid Society and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. (Wiener had served as a visiting lecturer at Tsing-Hua University in 1935-1936.) He was interested in placing scholars such as Yuk-Wing Lee and Antoni Zygmund who had lost their positions.

During and after World War II

In 1941, Wiener accepted an appointment with the National Defense Research Committee at the invitation of Vannevar Bush. Assigned to work with the NDRC's Fire Control committee, his work on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns caused Wiener to investigate information theory independently of Claude Shannon and to invent the Wiener filter. (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, with Arturo Rosenblueth and his research assistant Julian Bigelow, the 1943 article 'Behavior, Purpose and Teleology', which was published in Philosophy of Science. Subsequently his anti-aircraft work led him to formulate cybernetics. Wiener left the NDRC when his contract ended in 1943.

After the war, his fame helped MIT to recruit a research team in cognitive science, composed of researchers in neuropsychology and the mathematics and biophysics of the nervous system, including Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts. These men later made pioneering contributions to computer science and artificial 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 and Siegelman suggest that Wiener's wife Margaret, who detested McCulloch's bohemian lifestyle, engineered the breach.

Patrick D. Wall speculated that after the publication of Cybernetics, 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.

Wiener later helped develop the theories of cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He discussed the modeling of neurons with John von Neumann, and in a letter from November 1946 von Neumann presented his thoughts in advance of a meeting with Wiener.

Wiener always shared his theories and findings with other researchers, and credited the contributions of others. These included Soviet researchers and their findings. Wiener's acquaintance with them caused him to be regarded with suspicion during the Cold War. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, 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 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 beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.

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 of Cybernetics while in residence there. Rosenblueth and Wiener subsequently received a five-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to support their collaboration in Mexico and at MIT. Together, they developed "the first mathematical model of circus movement reentry" in 1946.

He was a Fulbright scholar at the Collège de France (1951), visiting lecturer at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (1953-1954), guest professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (1955-1956), the University of Naples (1960-1961), and the Netherlands Central Institute for Brain Research (1964), where he was honorary head of the neurocybernetics department. Netherlands.

Wiener was a participant of the Macy conferences.

Personal life

In 1926, Wiener married Margaret Engemann, an assistant professor of modern languages at Juniata College. They had two daughters.

Wiener admitted in his autobiography I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy to abusing Benzedrine throughout his life without being fully aware of its dangers.

A famous anecdote demonstrates his dedication to teaching:

One day, [he] was walking across the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While he was walking, someone stopped him and asked a question about Fourier analysis. Wiener didn't hesitate. He took out a small piece of paper and carefully wrote down the answer, explaining it step by step. The person was very thankful, said thanks, and started to leave. But Wiener stopped him and asked, "Just one moment—which direction was I walking when you met me?" The man pointed in the direction Wiener had been heading. Wiener smiled and said, "Good. That means I've already had my lunch."

Wiener died on March 18, 1964, aged 69, in Stockholm, from a heart attack. Wiener and his wife are buried at the Vittum Hill Cemetery in Sandwich, New Hampshire.

Doctoral students

• Shikao Ikehara (PhD 1930)
• Dorothy Walcott Weeks (PhD 1930)
• Norman Levinson (Sc.D. 1935)
• Brockway McMillan (PhD 1939)
• Abe Gelbart (PhD 1940)
• John P. Costas (engineer) (PhD 1951)
• Amar Bose (Sc.D. 1956)
• George Zames (Sc.D. 1960)
• Colin Cherry (PhD 1956)