Biography
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 alive as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837. Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, apart from 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 target until he left home. In his autobiography, Norbert referred his father as calm and patient, unless he Norbert failed to supply a correct answer, at which his father would lose his temper.
A child prodigy, 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 examine philosophy. He graduated in 1911 at 17 years of age.
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 Ph.D. in June 1913, when he was only 19 years old, for a dissertation on mathematical logic a comparison of the go forward to of Ernst Schröder with that of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, supervised by Karl Schmidt, the fundamental results of which were published as Wiener 1914. He was one of the youngest tosuch(a) 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 nature theory, thus the idea of relations does not require all axioms or primitive notions distinct from those of shape theory. In 1921, Kazimierz Kuratowski present a simplification of Wiener's definition of ordered pairs, and that simplification has been in common ownership ever since. this is the 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 approximately a politician the newspaper's owners sought to promote.
Although Wiener eventually became a staunch pacifist, he eagerly contributed to the war attempt in World War I. In 1916, with America's programs into the war drawing closer, Wiener attended a training camp for potential military officers but failed to construct 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 workings with other mathematicians strengthened his interest in mathematics. However, Wiener was still eager to serve in uniform and decided to make one more effort 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 whether 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 portion stationed at Aberdeen, Maryland. World War I ended just days after Wiener's usefulness to Aberdeen and Wiener was discharged from the military in February 1919.
Wiener was unable to secure a permanent position at Harvard, a situation he attributed largely to [update], it has been removed.
In 1926, Wiener returned to Europe as a 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 Philip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener's niece, married Václav E. Beneš. Norbert 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 one time to find his group 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, "That's why I stayed behind, Daddy!"
In the run-up to World War II 1939–45 Wiener became a detail of the China Aid Society and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.
He was interested in placing scholars such(a) as Yuk-Wing Lee and Antoni Zygmund who had lost their positions.
During World War II, 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. To him is due the now specifics practice of modeling an information consultation as a random process—in other words, as a variety of noise. Initially his anti-aircraft work led him to write, with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow the 1943 article 'Behavior, goal and Teleology', which was published in Philosophy of Science. Subsequently his anti-aircraft work led him to formulate cybernetics. 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 filed pioneering contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. Soon after the business 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 Siegelmanthat Wiener's wife Margaret, who detested McCulloch's bohemian lifestyle, engineered the breach.
Wiener later helped introducing 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 remain of a meeting with Wiener.
Wiener always divided up 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 improvements the indications 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 effect 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.
Wiener was a participant of the Macy conferences.
In 1926 Wiener married Margaret Engemann, an assistant professor of modern languages at Juniata College.[] They had two daughters.[] Opinions are non all positive on Margaret's impacts on Wiener's career.
Wiener died in March 1964, aged 69, in Stockholm, from a heart attack. Wiener and his wife are buried at the Vittum Hill Cemetery in Sandwich, New Hampshire.