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
rabbi, philosopher and physician from
Al Andalus, as well as to
Akiva Eger,
chief rabbi of
Posen from 1815 to 1837. 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". 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. He later met Wiener's mother Bertha Kahn, the daughter of department store owner Henry Kahn, in St. Joseph's,
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., with rumours that one family member ended up becoming a
Western bandit and was shot trying to evade capture. 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 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." 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 . 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 \ \left( x, y \right) = \bigl\{ \left\{ x \right\}, \left\{x, y \right\}\ \bigr\} ~. 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 , Zurich 1932 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.
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. 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.
Awards and honors • Wiener was a Plenary Speaker of the
ICM in 1936 at Oslo and in 1950 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. • Wiener won the
Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1933 and the
National Medal of Science in 1963, presented by President Johnson at a White House Ceremony in January, 1964, shortly before Wiener's death. • Wiener won the 1965 U.S.
National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion for
God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. • The
Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics was endowed in 1967 in honor of Norbert Wiener by MIT's mathematics department and is provided jointly by the
American Mathematical Society and
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. • The
Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility awarded annually by
CPSR, was established in 1987 in honor of Wiener to recognize contributions by computer professionals to socially responsible use of computers. • The crater
Wiener on the
far side of the
Moon is named after him. • The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications, at the
University of Maryland, College Park, is named in his honor. • Robert A. Heinlein named a spaceship after him in his 1957 novel
Citizen of the Galaxy, a "Free Trader" ship called the
Norbert Wiener mentioned in Chapter 14. • The
Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park is devoted to the scientific and mathematical legacy of Norbert Wiener. The NWC website highlights the research activities of the center. Further, each year the Norbert Wiener Center hosts the February Fourier Talks, a two-day national conference displaying advances in pure and applied harmonic analysis in industry, government, and academia. • Honorary degrees:
Tufts University (1946),
University of Mexico (1951),
Grinnell College (1957)
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) ==Work==