NORBERT WIENER (1894-1964)
1. LIFE
Norbert Wiener was born in 1894, on November 26, in Columbia (Missouri).
His father, Leo Wiener, once a professor of Slavic languages at
Harvard, came from Byelostok in Tsarist Russia. A very precocious
child, with a father determined to make his son a pre-eminent
scholar, he was awarded a Ph.D. by Harvard at the age of 18. Then
he studied Philosophy, Logic, and Mathematics in Cambridge (England)
and Göttingen under Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert, among
others.
His first post of importance was that of Instructor of Mathematics
at MIT in 1919, followed by that of Assistant Professor in 1929
and of Professor in 1931. He has always been faithful to MIT,
"which has given me the encouragement to work and the freedom
to think", an attitude in contrast to his opinion of Harvard.
In 1933 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA),
from which he resigned in 1941. In l940 he started to collaborate
in a research project at MIT on anti-aircraft devices, which played
an important part in his reflections upon what was to become the
science of Cybernetics.
Wiener participated in many international congresses, and several
of them had great influence on his scientific productivity , for
example, the International Congress of Mathematics in Strasbourg
(1920), which gave him his first opportunities to meet French
mathematicians such as Maurice Fréchet, Jacques Hadamard,
and Paul Lévy. In 1926 he married Marguerite Engelmann.
He spent the academic year 1935-1936 in China as a visiting professor
at Tsing Hua University in Peking, which gave him the opportunity
to learn the Mandarin form of Chinese. In 1945 he worked with
Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico City, at the Instituto Nacional de
Cardiologia. This lasted, one year out of two, till 1950, and
had an important impact upon his ideas about the science which
was to be called Cybernetics. In 1946, on the occasion of a conference
in France at the Université de Nancy, he gave lectures
on harmonic analysis. In 1951 he participated in a congress in
Paris on calculating machines and human thought, and gave two
short lectures at the Collège de France and one at the
Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications.
From 1953 to 1964 he lectured in India, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands.
In 1964, on March 18, Norbert Wiener died in Stockholm of a second
heart attack, the first having occurred just over ten years before.
2. WORKS
Apart from two books devoted to his autobiography, two short stories
and a novel, Norbert Wiener's works concern mainly logic and mathematics,
cybernetics, mathematical physics and philosophical issues.
His papers on logic, written mainly at the beginning of his career,
show a philosophical interest in mathematical thinking and its
possible limitations. His contributions to mathematics and probability
theory started in the early twenties with a mathematical modelling
of Brownian motion introducing what was later to be called Wiener
Measure. It gave rise to his concept of "differential space",
which is akin to Banach space. These researches culminated in
1930 with his "generalized harmonic analysis" which
allows the Fourier transform to be used for a large class of very
irregular functions (of which periodic and almost periodic functions
are special cases), also introducing their "covariance function"
and "spectral distribution. He was inspired in that field
both by J.Willard Gibbs as regards statistical physics, and by
Henri Lebesgue, who propounded a famous generalization of the
notion of integral. In a way, generalized harmonic analysis introduced
what Wiener later (1938) called "homogeneous chaos",
a notion not so far removed from what Jean Bass presented as "pseudo-aleatory
functions" (1974, 1984).
The idea of "cybernetics" came to Wiener at the beginning
of the forties, prompted by his work on anti-aircraft defence
and by contacts with colleagues in Mexico ("Behavior, purpose
and teleology" with A. Rosenblueth and J. Bigelow, Philos.Sci
1943). lt was made known to the world by the book Cybernetics
or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published
in l948 after contacts in l946 with M. Freymann of Hermann et
Cie (Paris). Coined from the Greek "kubernetike" (the
art of the steersman), cybernetics involves the theory of regulation
and of signal transmission applied to technical devices, living
beings and even societies. It may also concern the art of government,
or "cybernétique" as Ampère conceived
it in 1843, which Plato, using the already existent Greek word,
compared to that of the captain of a ship. Two main ideas play
a part in cybernetics: negative feedback with its stabilizing
properties, and transmission of information, which helps to make
a whole of the many parts of a complex system, whether living
or not. The metaphor of the computer, with the role of Boolean
logic, is also present in cybernetics. It is of interest to note
that Wiener, remembering Leibniz's "calculus ratiocinator"
and his construction, after Pascal, of a mechanical computer,
considered him a patron saint of cybernetics, whereas Warren S.
McCulloch favoured Descartes.
Research into the transmission of information is greatly indebted,
as Wiener emphasized, to Claude E. Shannon's information theory
(1948,1949), introducing the concept of quantity of information
which involves a degree of formalism close to that of entropy
in statistical mechanics. It is also linked to the theory of signal
transmission in the presence of a perturbative noise, as developed
by Wiener in 1942 in a classified monograph (nicknamed "the
yellow peril" because of the color of the cover and the difficulty
of the subject) and then in Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing
of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949).
In this book Wiener applies generalized harmonic analysis to stationary
aleatory signals and solves the problem of optimal elimination
of the perturbative noise and of optimal prediction of the signal
itself, with the help of a filtering operator. Quite independently,
A.N. Kolmogoroff had announced results in the same domain at a
time (1941) when scientific communications were interrupted. Improvements
regarding prediction were published by Wiener in collaboration
with Pier Masani in 1959.
Norbert Wiener was also deeply attracted to mathematical physics.
His interest originated in a collaboration with Max Born in 1926
on quantization and developed (1927,1928) in the direction of
relativistic quantum theory and the use of a fifth dimension as
proposed by Kaluza and Klein. Einstein's attempt to unify gravitation
and electromagnetism also aroused his interest (1929). Later,
Wiener returned to quantum mechanics with a theory of statistical
hidden variables using his differential space and aiming at explaining
the principles of quantum measurement. These researches were published,
in collaboration with Armand Siegel, from 1953 to 1956and presented,
along with other considerations, in a posthumous book (1966).
Wiener's interests were not limited to logic, mathematics, cybernetics
or mathematical physics. He was also familiar with all the aspects
of philosophy, from epistemology and metaphysics to morals. .
With The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) he gives a presentation
of cybernetics underlining its social aspects with some emphasis
on the role of randomness and entropy. Another book, entitled
God, Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics
Impinges on Religion, published in the year of Wiener's death,
shows, although he was a skeptic, his interest in theology. In
a very different field, he wrote two short stories and a novel
(The Tempter,1959). Wiener also published an autobiography in
two parts: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1953) and I Am
a Mathematician (1956).
3. PERSONALITY
Norbert Wiener's personality has many facets. Gifted for abstract
sciences, philosophy and literature, he also had an inclination
to the fine arts. These tendencies were certainly enhanced by
a meditative temperament partly due to his ungainliness and myopia,
which disqualified him for the usual games of physical skill popular
among youngsters, but also due to the influence of his father.
As far as psychology is concerned, he was strongly against psychoanalysis,
mainly because of its dogmatic jargon, but he was not opposed
to the ideas advanced by Freud himself. He was much attracted
to languages and said "I have a facility to learn languages,
at least up to a certain point". He liked to exchange ideas
in the language of his interlocutor, even if imperfectly, commenting:
"One cannot understand a nation without knowing its language".
Consequently, sixteen of his articles are in French (one of them
dictated in English to the translator), five in German and one
in Spanish.
Wiener liked life in the country and hiking. This is why he spent
the summer months in "Tamarack Cottage", in the little
village of South Tamworth near Sandwich (New Hampshire). He also
appreciated there the tranquillity of the attic in which he used
to work at a blackboard. His privacy was also preserved by his
wife, who protected him from intruders demanding articles, interviews,
etc..
The concept of cybernetics, even before the adoption of the word,
inspired the creation, in 1943, of "The Teleological Society",
also called the "Cybernetics Group" in which Wiener
participated with J. von Neumann, Walter Pitts and others, under
the aegis of the Josiah Macy Foundation. Another society called
the "Cercle d'Etudes Cybernétiques", founded
in 1950, also aroused his interest. Its honorary president was
Louis de Broglie, who used to present the notes for the "Comptes
Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences" proposed by Wiener.
Prizes and medals in memory of Wiener have been created. One of
them, the "Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal", has
been presented several times since his death, once by Mrs. Margaret
Wiener-Kennedy, his younger daughter.
Norbert Wiener's personality was generous: "I want to be
the master of nobody", he told me once. His skeptical tendencies
("I do not understand Pascal") made him an enemy of
all dogmatism. An admirer of Leibniz and Bergson, and of Lebesgue
and Hadamard, he was a great, intuitive mathematician, gifted
with philosophical insight.
PUBLICATIONS BY NORBERT WIENER
Books
- Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine, Hermann et Cie, Paris, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.),
Wiley and Sons, New York, 1948. Second edition, revised, with
two more chapters, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), Wiley and
Sons, New York, 1961.
- Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time
Series with Engineering Applications, The MIT Press, Cambridge
(Mass.), Wiley and Sons, New York, Chapman & Hall, London,
1949.
- The Human Use of Human Beings, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1950.
- Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, Simon and Schuster, New
York, 1953.
- I Am a Mathematician. The Later Life of an Ex-Prodigy, Doubleday,
Garden City, New York, 1956.
- The Tempter, Random House, New York, 1959.
- God, Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics
Impinges on Religion, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1964.
- Differential space, Quantum Systems and Prediction, with A.
Siegel, B. Rankin, W.T. Martin, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.),
1966.
Articles
About 300, among them entries in encyclopedias (19), reviews of
books or articles (19) and two short stories ("The brain"
and "The miracle of the broom closet").
PUBLICATIONS ON NORBERT WIENER
- Masani P.R., Norbert Wiener. 1894-1964, Birkhäuser Verlag,
Basel, 1990. Contains a complete bibliography.
- Masani P.R., ed., Norbert Wiener: Collected Works, The MIT Press,
Cambridge (Mass.), vol.I, 1976, vol.II, 1979, vol.III,1981, vol.IV,
1985.
- Heims Steve J., John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, The MIT
Press, Cambridge (Mass),1981.
- Vallée R.,"A Week in New Hampshire with Norbert
Wiener", in: Cybernetics and Systems' 90, Trappl R. (ed.),
World Scientific, Singapore, 1990, pp. 343-348.
Robert Vallée
Université Paris-Nord
Sept. 2OO1