Norbert Wiener Popular Books

Norbert Wiener Biography & Facts

Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American computer scientist, mathematician and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines, After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should; and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek κυβερνήτης or steersman. 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. Norbert 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 modern artificial intelligence. Biography 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 rabbi, philosopher and physician from Al Andalus, as well as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837.: p. 4 Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 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 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.”He graduated from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, and Wiener then entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell 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 (x, y) = {{x}, {x, y}}. 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 seminary on Phenomenology." (Letter to Russell, c. June or July, 1914). During 1915–16, 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 as of 2017, it has 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 Fouri.... Discover the Norbert Wiener popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Norbert Wiener books.

Best Seller Norbert Wiener Books of 2024

  • Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 1 synopsis, comments

    Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 1

    Travis D. Andrews, Radu Balan, John J. Benedetto, Wojciech Czaja & Kasso A. Okoudjou

    The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications provides a stateofthe art research venue for the broad emerging area of mathematical engineering in the context of ...

  • Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm synopsis, comments

    Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm

    Luke Lafitte & Jeffrey J. Kripal

    Explores how we naturally project consciousness onto machines and how this is reflected in human culture, science, artificial intelligence, and literature Demonstrates a direct c...

  • Harmonies of Disorder synopsis, comments

    Harmonies of Disorder

    Leone Montagnini

    This book presents the entire body of thought of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), knowledge of which is essential if one wishes to understand and correctly interpret the age in which we...

  • Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 2 synopsis, comments

    Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 2

    Travis D. Andrews, Radu Balan, John J. Benedetto, Wojciech Czaja & Kasso A. Okoudjou

    The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications provides a stateoftheart research venue for the broad emerging area of mathematical engineering in the context of h...

  • Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 3 synopsis, comments

    Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 3

    Radu Balan, Matthew J. Begué, John J. Benedetto, Wojciech Czaja & Kasso A. Okoudjou

    This volume consists of contributions spanning a wide spectrum of harmonic analysis and its applications written by speakers at the February Fourier Talks from 2002 – 2013. Contain...

  • Dark Hero of the Information Age synopsis, comments

    Dark Hero of the Information Age

    Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman

    Child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician, Norbert Wiener founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and ignited the informationage explosion of computers, automation, an...

  • Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 5 synopsis, comments

    Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 5

    Radu Balan, John J. Benedetto, Wojciech Czaja, Matthew Dellatorre & Kasso A. Okoudjou

    This volume consists of contributions spanning a wide spectrum of harmonic analysis and its applications written by speakers at the February Fourier Talks from 2002 – 2016. Contain...

  • Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 4 synopsis, comments

    Excursions in Harmonic Analysis, Volume 4

    Radu Balan, Matthew Begué, John J. Benedetto, Wojciech Czaja & Kasso A. Okoudjou

    This volume consists of contributions spanning a wide spectrum of harmonic analysis and its applications written by speakers at the February Fourier Talks from 2002 – 2013. Contain...

  • A Mind at Play synopsis, comments

    A Mind at Play

    Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman

    Winner of the Neumann Prize for the History of Mathematics "We owe Claude Shannon a lot, and Soni & Goodman’s book takes a big first step in paying that debt." San Francisco Re...

  • The Fifties synopsis, comments

    The Fifties

    James R. Gaines

    An “exciting and enlightening revisionist history” (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrate...

  • Off the Charts synopsis, comments

    Off the Charts

    Ann Hulbert

    From the author of the widely praised Raising Americaa compelling exploration of child genius told through the gripping stories of fifteen exceptionally gifted boys and girls, from...