Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener

Born: 26 Nov 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, USA
Died: 18 March 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden

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Norbert Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard at the age of 18 with a dissertation on mathematical logic. From Harvard to went to Cambridge, England to study under Russell, then he went to Göttingen to study under Hilbert. He was influence by both Hilbert and Russell but also, perhaps to an even greater degree, by Hardy.

After various occupations (journalist, university teacher, engineer, writer) in which he was very unhappy, he began a long association with MIT in 1919.

His work on generalised harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems won the Bôcher Prize in 1933. He had an extraordinarily wide range of interests and contributed to many areas including cybernetics (a term he coined), stochastic processes, quantum theory and during World War II he worked on gunfire control. His wide dealings with other scientists led him to say

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much from mathematics.

Some of Weiner's most important publications include The Fourier Integral, and Certain of Its Applications (1933), Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958) and God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964).

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. P R Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964 (Basel- Boston- Berlin, 1990).
  4. Norbert Wiener, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 72 (1966).
  5. N Wiener, Ex-Prodigy : my childhood and youth (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
  6. N Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (London, 1956).
  7. D Jerison and D Stroock, Norbert Wiener, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 42 (1995), 430-438.
  8. V Mandrekar, Mathematical Work of Norbert Wiener, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 42 (1995), 664-669.
  9. S J Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener : from mathematics to the technologies of life and death (Cambridge Mass., 1980).
  10. H J Ilgauds, Norbert Wiener (Leipzig, 1980-84).
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