Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy Norbert Wiener with a new foreword by Ronald R. Kline The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2017 Norbert Wiener Foreword © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ex-Prodigy copyright © 1953 by Norbert Wiener. First edition published 1953 by Si- mon and Schuster, Inc. First MIT Press Paperback Edition, August, 1964 I Am a Mathematician copyright © 1956 by Norbert Wiener. First MIT Press Paperback Edition, August 1, 1964. Published by agreement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Sans Std and ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964, author. | Kline, Ronald R., writer of foreword. | Container of (work): Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964. Ex-prodigy. | Container of (work): Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964. I am a mathematician. Title: Norbert Wiener--a life in cybernetics : Ex-prodigy : my childhood and youth, and I am a mathematician : the later life of a prodigy / Norbert Wiener ; with a new foreword by Ronald R. Kline. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017042823 | ISBN 9780262535441 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964. | Mathematicians--United States-- Biography. Classification: LCC QA29.W497 A25 2018 | DDC 510.92 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042823 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword by Ronald R. Kline vii I Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth 1 Dedication 3 Foreword 5 Introduction 7 1 A Russian Irishman in Kansas City 11 2 The Proper Missourians 23 3 First Remembered Patterns: 1894–1901 29 4 Cambridge to Cambridge, via New York and Vienna: June–September, 1901 41 5 In the Sweat of My Brow: Cambridge, September, 1901–September, 1903 49 6 Diversions of a Wunderkind 63 7 A Child among Adolescents: Ayer High School, 1903–1906 73 8 College Man in Short Trousers: September, 1906–June, 1909 81 9 Neither Child nor Youth 91 10 The Square Peg: Harvard, 1909–1910 99 11 Disinherited: Cornell, 1910–1911 113 12 Problems and Confusions: Summer, 1911 123 13 A Philosopher Despite Himself: Harvard, 1911–1913 129 14 Emancipation: Cambridge, June, 1913–April, 1914 141 15 A Traveling Scholar in Wartime: 1914–1915 159 16 Trial Run: Teaching at Harvard and the University of Maine: 1915–1917 175 17 Monkey Wrench, Paste Pot, and the Slide Rule War: 1917–1919 189 18 The Return to Mathematics 201 19 Epilogue 219 vi Contents II I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy 227 Dedication 229 Preface 231 20 My Start as a Mathematician 233 21 The International Mathematical Congress of 1920 at Strasbourg 253 22 1920–1925: Years of Consolidation 273 23 The Period of My Travels Abroad—Max Born and Quantum Theory 287 24 To Europe as a Guggenheim Fellow with My Bride 303 25 1927–1931: Years of Growth and Progress 313 26 An Unofficial Cambridge Don 329 27 Back Home: 1932–1933 343 28 Voices Prophesying War: 1933–1935 349 29 China and Around the World 357 30 The Days before the War: 1936–1939 375 31 The War.Years: 1940–1945 389 32 Mexico: 1944 425 33 Moral Problems of a Scientist. The Atomic Bomb: 1942– 437 34 Nancy, Cybernetics, Paris, and After: 1946–1952 453 35 India: 1953 471 36 Epilogue 485 Index 493 Foreword Foreword Foreword © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved When the two-volume autobiography of Norbert Wiener was published in the 1950s, newspapers and magazines in the United States reviewed it widely because the author, a distinguished mathematician at the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology, had become a public figure. Following the surprising success of his runaway scientific bestseller, Cybernetics, published in 1948, journalists ignored its arcane mathematics to interview Wiener about the philosophical and social issues raised in the book. They asked the polymath professor whether the newly invented electronic digital comput- ers, dubbed “electronic brains” by the press, could think, the extent of the unemployment that computerized automatic factories would cause in what Wiener called the second industrial revolution, and what the field of cybernetics, coming out of the scientific laboratories of World War II, had to say about the new relationships between humans and machines being forged in the post-war order. Wiener’s next book, The Human Use of Human Beings, published in 1950, reached a wider and even larger audience, securing his place as a pubic intellectual. Wiener drew on his cybernetic vision of the world to analyze such wide-ranging issues as the nature of law, education, and language, the harmful effects of lavish government funding and military secrecy on science, and the Cold War anxieties surrounding McCarthyism and the nuclear threat of the Soviet Union. He thought the mathematical science of cybernetics could shed light on the atomic age because it was based on the idea that the principles of control and communication engineering could explain all self-regulating organisms, living and nonliving, from the level of the cell to that of society. Wiener and his followers touted cybernetics as a universal science, one that could model humans as machines in the social sciences, build human-like machines in the new field of artificial intelli- gence, and create prosthetic cyborgs (short for “cybernetic organisms”) by merging humans and machines. Wiener defined cybernetics as a theory viii Foreword of the messages that held together all organisms, including society. It was thus a science of the future, where “messages between man and machines, between machine and man, and between machine and machine, are des- tined to play an ever-increasing part.”1 At the height of the enthusiasm for cybernetics—-when it was taken up by scientists, engineers, humanists, science-fiction writers, artists, and musicians—-Wiener published his two-volume autobiography. Ex-Prodigy appeared in 1953, followed by I Am a Mathematician in 1956. Ex-Prodigy received the most publicity. Wiener promoted the book on radio and televi- sion shows in New York City, including the Today Show on NBC. Newspa- pers and magazines followed up the stories they had carried about Wiener, cybernetics, and the automatic factory with rave reviews of Ex-Prodigy. High-brow and middle-brow outlets—including the New York Times, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the New Yorker, Saturday Review, and Time magazines—praised Wiener for baring his soul about how he overcame the traumas of being raised as a child prodigy by his overbearing father, Leo Wiener, who became a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University, to become the eminent mathematician who founded cybernetics. Among those reviewing the book were the liberal public intellectuals journalist Max Lerner, historian Henry Steele Commager, and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead knew Wiener well, having participated with him in the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation con- ference series on cybernetics. Held from 1946 to 1953, the interdisciplinary meetings did much to introduce Wiener’s ideas into biology and the social sciences. Writing in the scholarly Virginia Quarterly Review, Mead observed that the “story is shot through with pain,” but Wiener “measures his words, uses them sparingly and with precision, and achieves an almost Olympian objectivity and gentleness.”2 It was Wiener’s favorite review; he thought she understood him the best. The sequel, I Am a Mathematician, subtitled “The Later Life of a Prodigy,” did not receive as much press, even though editor Jason Epstein at Doubleday succeeded in prodding Wiener to explain his advanced mathematics in lay terms. Although the MIT Press has kept the two volumes in print since Wiener’s death in 1964, this is an excellent time to republish them as one volume. The past few years have witnessed a renaissance of interest in Wiener and cybernetics in the humanities and social sciences, systems science, and the biological sciences. The two volumes cover what seem at first glance to be two tenuously related eras of Wiener’s life. Ex-Prodigy recounts the period from his birth to an immigrant Russian-Jewish father and a German-American mother in the Foreword ix university town of Columbia, Missouri, in 1894, through his trials as a child prodigy—when he entered Tufts college at the age of eleven, obtained his bachelor’s degree at fourteen, and his doctorate from Harvard at eighteen— to his emancipation from his father upon his appointment to MIT in 1919 and his marriage to Margaret Engemann in 1926. I Am a Mathematician takes up the story from there. It relates how he became a world-renowned mathematician at MIT by doing research in pure and applied mathematics in the areas of Brownian motion, generalized harmonic analysis, probabil- ity theory, and the statistical theory of communication, which forms a basis for cybernetics. Yet each volume informs the other. We gain a much better understand- ing of why Wiener viewed mathematics as an aesthetic, creative art and how he helped establish the interdiscipline of cybernetics, discussed in I Am a Mathematician, by reading about his unusual education and his varied life experiences in Ex-Prodigy. Before joining MIT, he worked as a journalist and encyclopedia writer, an engineering apprentice at General Electric, and a human “computer” of gunnery tables in World War I.

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