Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener Biography

Born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, USA, Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who established the science of cybernetics. He achieved international renown by making some of the most important contributions to mathematics in the 20th century.

Facts about Norbert Wiener

Wiener, a child prodigy whose education was controlled by his father, a professor of Slavic languages ​​and literature at Harvard University, graduated in mathematics from Tufts College (now Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts) in 1909 at the age of 14. He spent a year at Harvard as a graduate student in zoology but dropped out after discovering he was unfit for laboratory work.

At the suggestion of his father, he began studying philosophy and completed a doctorate at Harvard in 1913 with a dissertation on mathematical logic.

With a scholarship from Harvard, Wienerwent first to England to study mathematical logic at Cambridge University with Bertrand Russell, and then to the University of Göttingen in Germany, to study with David Hilbert.

On Russell’s advice, he also began a serious study of general mathematics, in which he was strongly influenced by Russell, by the pure English mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy and, to a lesser extent, by Hilbert. He published his first article in the mathematical journal Messenger of Mathematics in 1913, in Cambridge.

When World War I broke out, he tried to enlist but was turned away due to poor eyesight. For five years he tried a variety of occupations. He was a professor at the University of Maine, an encyclopedia writer, an engineering apprentice, a journalist, and a mathematician at Aberdeen, Maryland, Proving Grounds. Finally, in 1919.

He was hired as an instructor by the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a department with no real academic or research tradition at the time. However, it turned out to be the right step for Wiener as it had entered an extremely productive period, just as MIT was beginning to become a great center for learning in science and technology. Wiener remained on the MIT faculty until his retirement.

During the 1920s, Wiener did very innovative and fundamental work on what is now called stochastic processes and, in particular, on the theory of Brownian motion and generalized harmonic analysis, as well as significant work on other problems of mathematical analysis. In 1933, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences but soon resigned, repelled by some of the aspects of institutionalized science that he encountered there.

During world war II, Wiener worked on the problem of aiming firearm shots at a moving target. The ideas that evolved led to Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series(1949), which first appeared as a classified report and established Wiener as a co-discoverer, together with the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, of the theory on the prediction of stationary time series.

He introduced certain statistical methods to communications and control engineering and was highly influential in these areas. This work also led him to formulate the concept of cybernetics.

In 1948 his book was publishedCybernetics or the control and communication in animals and machines. For a scientific book, it was extremely popular and Wiener became known to a much broader scientific community. Cybernetics is interdisciplinary in nature; Based on common human-machine relationships.

It is currently used in control theory, automation theory, and computer programs to reduce many time-consuming calculations and decision-making processes previously performed by humans. Wiener worked on cybernetics, philosophized about it, and spread it for the rest of his life while continuing to research other areas of mathematics.

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After the war, Wiener He continued to contribute new ideas to widely divergent topics, including mathematical prediction theory and quantum theory, providing the latter with a possible solution to a difficulty that physicists had debated. Niels Bohr Y Albert Einstein.

Applying his theoretical description of Brownian motion to quantum phenomena, he showed how quantum theory, insofar as it is based on probability, is consistent with other branches of science. In 1963, Wiener received the National Medal of Sciences; the medal was presented to him a few weeks before his death the following year.

Wiener wrote many other works. He discussed the implications of mathematics for public and private affairs in Cybernetics and society(ed. Rev., 1954) and Dios y Golem S.A. Comments on certain points where cybernetics and religion collide(1964). Wiener also completed two volumes of autobiography, Ex-prodigy(1953) and I Am a Mathematician(1956).