Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was born in 1894, on November 26, in Columbia (Missouri). His father, Leo Wiener, once a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard, came from Byelostok in Tsarist Russia. A very precocious child, with a father determined to make his son a pre-eminent scholar, he was awarded a Ph.D. by Harvard at the age of 18. Then he studied Philosophy, Logic, and Mathematics in Cambridge (England).
His first post of importance was that of Instructor of Mathematics at MIT in 1919, followed by that of Assistant Professor in 1929 and of Professor in 1931. In 1933 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA), from which he resigned in 1941. In l940 he started to collaborate in a research project at MIT on anti-aircraft devices, which played an important part in his reflections upon what was to become the science of Cybernetics.
He spent the academic year 1935-1936 in China as a visiting professor at Tsing Hua University in Peking, which gave him the opportunity to learn the Mandarin form of Chinese. In 1945 he worked with Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico City, at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia. This lasted, one year out of two, till 1950, and had an important impact upon his ideas about the science which was to be called Cybernetics.
The idea of "cybernetics" came to Wiener at the beginning of the forties, prompted by his work on anti-aircraft defence and by contacts with colleagues in Mexico ("Behavior, purpose and teleology" with A. Rosenblueth and J. Bigelow, Philos.Sci 1943). lt was made known to the world by the book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published in l948 after contacts in l946 with M. Freymann of Hermann et Cie (Paris). Coined from the Greek "kubernetike" (the art of the steersman), cybernetics involves the theory of regulation and of signal transmission applied to technical devices, living beings and even societies. It may also concern the art of government, or "cybernétique" as Ampère conceived it in 1843, which Plato, using the already existent Greek word, compared to that of the captain of a ship. Two main ideas play a part in cybernetics: negative feedback with its stabilizing properties, and transmission of information, which helps to make a whole of the many parts of a complex system, whether living or not. The metaphor of the computer, with the role of Boolean logic, is also present in cybernetics.
Research into the transmission of information is greatly indebted, as Wiener emphasized, to Claude E. Shannon's information theory (1948,1949), introducing the concept of quantity of information which involves a degree of formalism close to that of entropy in statistical mechanics. It is also linked to the theory of signal transmission in the presence of a perturbative noise, as developed by Wiener in 1942 in a classified monograph (nicknamed "the yellow peril" because of the color of the cover and the difficulty of the subject) and then in Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949).
Apart from two books devoted to his autobiography, two short stories and a novel, Norbert Wiener's works concern mainly logic and mathematics, cybernetics, mathematical physics and philosophical issues.
In 1946, on the occasion of a conference in France at the Université de Nancy, he gave lectures on harmonic analysis. In 1951 he participated in a congress in Paris on calculating machines and human thought, and gave two short lectures at the Collège de France and one at the Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications. From 1953 to 1964 he lectured in India, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands.
In 1964, on March 18, Norbert Wiener died in Stockholm of a second heart attack, the first having occurred just over ten years before.
Source: www.isss.org (Robert Vallée, Université Paris-Nord, Sept. 2001)
His first post of importance was that of Instructor of Mathematics at MIT in 1919, followed by that of Assistant Professor in 1929 and of Professor in 1931. In 1933 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA), from which he resigned in 1941. In l940 he started to collaborate in a research project at MIT on anti-aircraft devices, which played an important part in his reflections upon what was to become the science of Cybernetics.
He spent the academic year 1935-1936 in China as a visiting professor at Tsing Hua University in Peking, which gave him the opportunity to learn the Mandarin form of Chinese. In 1945 he worked with Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico City, at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia. This lasted, one year out of two, till 1950, and had an important impact upon his ideas about the science which was to be called Cybernetics.
The idea of "cybernetics" came to Wiener at the beginning of the forties, prompted by his work on anti-aircraft defence and by contacts with colleagues in Mexico ("Behavior, purpose and teleology" with A. Rosenblueth and J. Bigelow, Philos.Sci 1943). lt was made known to the world by the book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published in l948 after contacts in l946 with M. Freymann of Hermann et Cie (Paris). Coined from the Greek "kubernetike" (the art of the steersman), cybernetics involves the theory of regulation and of signal transmission applied to technical devices, living beings and even societies. It may also concern the art of government, or "cybernétique" as Ampère conceived it in 1843, which Plato, using the already existent Greek word, compared to that of the captain of a ship. Two main ideas play a part in cybernetics: negative feedback with its stabilizing properties, and transmission of information, which helps to make a whole of the many parts of a complex system, whether living or not. The metaphor of the computer, with the role of Boolean logic, is also present in cybernetics.
Research into the transmission of information is greatly indebted, as Wiener emphasized, to Claude E. Shannon's information theory (1948,1949), introducing the concept of quantity of information which involves a degree of formalism close to that of entropy in statistical mechanics. It is also linked to the theory of signal transmission in the presence of a perturbative noise, as developed by Wiener in 1942 in a classified monograph (nicknamed "the yellow peril" because of the color of the cover and the difficulty of the subject) and then in Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949).
Apart from two books devoted to his autobiography, two short stories and a novel, Norbert Wiener's works concern mainly logic and mathematics, cybernetics, mathematical physics and philosophical issues.
In 1946, on the occasion of a conference in France at the Université de Nancy, he gave lectures on harmonic analysis. In 1951 he participated in a congress in Paris on calculating machines and human thought, and gave two short lectures at the Collège de France and one at the Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications. From 1953 to 1964 he lectured in India, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands.
In 1964, on March 18, Norbert Wiener died in Stockholm of a second heart attack, the first having occurred just over ten years before.
Source: www.isss.org (Robert Vallée, Université Paris-Nord, Sept. 2001)