Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener (Columbia, Missouri, United States, November 26, 1894 - Stockholm, Sweden, March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher, known as the founder of cybernetics. He coined the term in his book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in Animals and Machines, published in 1948.

Biography

His father, Leo Wiener, was a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University. Norbert was educated at home until he was seven, the age at which he began to attend school, but for a short time. He continued his studies at home until he returned to college in 1903, graduating from Ayer's Institute in 1906.

In September 1906, at the age of eleven, he entered Tufts University to study mathematics. He graduated in 1909 and entered Harvard, where he studied zoology, but in 1910 he transferred to Cornell University to undertake higher studies in philosophy; however, months later, he returned to Harvard. Wiener obtained his doctorate at that university in 1912, with a thesis that dealt with mathematical logic.

From Harvard he went to Cambridge, England, where he studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy. In 1914 he studied in Göttingen, Germany with David Hilbert and Edmund Landau. He then returned to Cambridge and from there to the USA. From 1915 to 1916 he taught philosophy at Harvard and worked for General Electric and the Encyclopedia Americana before working on ballistics at the Aberdeen proving ground (Aberdeen Proving Ground), in Maryland. He remained in Maryland until the end of the war, when he got a job teaching mathematics at MIT.

During the time he worked at MIT, he made frequent trips to Europe and it was at that time that he made contact with Leonardo Torres Quevedo and his machine "El Ajedrecista". In 1926 he married Margaret Engemann and he returned to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He spent most of his time in Göttingen or with Hardy at Cambridge. He worked on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis, and Tauberian theorems, among other problems. He won the Bôcher prize in 1933.

During World War II, he worked for the United States Armed Forces on a project to automatically guide anti-aircraft artillery using radar. The objective of the project was to predict the trajectory of bombers and with it adequately orient the shots of the batteries, through corrections based on the differences between the expected and actual trajectories, known as innovations of the process. As a result of the discoveries made in this project, he introduced into science the concepts of feedback or feedback, and quantity of information, thus becoming a precursor of the theory of communication or cognitive psychology. He worked with Alan Turing in the development of cybernetics. Later, in 1956, he will formulate part of the concept of Granger Causality.

Posts

• Cybernetics or control and communication in animals and machines (Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine(1948)
• Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949)
• Cybernetics and society (The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society(1950)
• Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1953) (autobiography)
• I am a Mathematician. The Later Life of an Ex-Prodigy (1956) (autobiography)
• Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958)
• The theory of Prediction (1956) Beckenback, E.F.(ed.) "Modern Mathematics for Engineers'. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• The Tempter (1959) (novela)
• God and Golem S.A. Comments on certain points in which cyberneticism and religion (God & Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion(1964)
• Inventar: about the gestation and cultivation of ideas. Introduction by Steve Joshua Heims; translation of Ambrosio García. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1995. ISBN 84-7223-898-9
• Cybernetics of the Nervous System (1965)
• Differential Space, Quantum Systems and Predictionwith A. Siegel, B. Rankin, W. T. Martin (1966)

Publications in Spanish about Norbert Wiener

• Steve J. Heims (1986). Von Neumann and N. Wiener. Salvat. ISBN 84-345-8145-0.

• José María Almira (2009). Norbert Wiener a mathematician among engineers. Nivola. ISBN 978-84-92493-49-4.

Eponymy

In addition to the mathematical concepts that bear his name, one must:

• The lunar crater Wiener carries this name in his memory.
• The asteroid (18182) Wiener also commemorates its name.
• There is a university in Peru under the name Norbert Wiener commemorating it.