Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was born November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, to Leo Wiener, a linguist who tutored his son at home with a severity Norbert later called close to abuse, refusing to accept a wrong answer without an outburst. The regimen worked in one sense: Wiener finished high school at eleven, took a Tufts degree in mathematics at fourteen, and earned a Harvard doctorate in mathematical logic at nineteen. It also left him socially awkward and prone to nervous collapse under pressure. He tried journalism and was fired for refusing to flatter a local politician, tried twice to enlist for the First World War and was rejected both times for poor eyesight, and finally landed a mathematics instructorship at MIT in 1919, after Harvard passed him over.

Wiener's anti-aircraft gunnery work for the National Defense Research Committee during the Second World War, predicting where a moving target would be rather than where it was, led him toward a general theory of feedback and communication that applied equally to machines, animals, and nervous systems. He published it in 1948 as Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, coining a word that spread into computing, robotics, neuroscience, and everyday talk of self-correcting systems. He reached core results in information theory independently and around the same time as Claude Shannon, though Shannon's version became the one engineers used. Unlike John von Neumann, his close correspondent and rival in postwar science policy, Wiener refused all government military funding after 1945, publishing a widely read Atlantic Monthly essay urging scientists to weigh what their weapons work made possible.

The refusal to build weapons did not make Wiener an easy colleague. In 1952 he abruptly cut off all contact with Warren McCulloch's research group at MIT, over what biographers believe was a rumor planted by his wife Margaret, who disapproved of McCulloch's circle. The break helped destroy the career of Walter Pitts, the group's most brilliant and fragile member, who burned his unfinished dissertation and drank himself to an early death within the decade, a collapse Wiener, so alert to the ethics of physicists building bombs, never publicly reckoned with in his own conduct. He also depended on Benzedrine for years without, by his own account, understanding what it was doing to him, and was notoriously absent-minded, family lore holding that he once returned from a trip and could not find his own house.

Wiener died of a heart attack in Stockholm on March 18, 1964, weeks after receiving the National Medal of Science from President Johnson. The word he coined has faded from everyday use, engineers now say control theory or systems theory, and the field is more often traced through Shannon's and von Neumann's successors than through Wiener's own book. What survived is the argument he made about consequences: the Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, established in 1987, still asks computer scientists to answer the question he raised in 1947, decades before most of them were born, about whether every discovery is worth handing to whoever is paying for it.

Norbert Wiener's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Scientist Rebels article
  Atlantic Monthly essay urging scientists to weigh the uses of their research 1947
• Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series book
  Wartime signal-processing research, nicknamed the yellow peril for its cover 1949
• Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine book
  Founding text of the field; coined the term 1948
• God and Golem, Inc. book
  National Book Award, awarded posthumously in 1965 1964
• Wiener filter discovery
  Noise-reduction and prediction method still used in signal engineering 1942

• November 26, 1894 aged 0 Born in Columbia, Missouri
• 1906 aged ~12 Finishes high school at eleven under his father's tutoring
• 1909 aged ~15 Earns a mathematics degree from Tufts College at fourteen
• June 1913 aged 18 Earns a Harvard PhD in mathematical logic at nineteen
• 1919 aged ~25 Joins the MIT mathematics faculty after Harvard passes him over
• 1926 aged ~32 Marries Margaret Engemann
• 1943 aged ~49 Co-writes Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, the paper that seeds cybernetics
• 1948 aged ~54 Publishes Cybernetics
• March 18, 1964 aged 69 Dies of a heart attack in Stockholm

• Claude Shannon 1916–2001
  Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication. raced to information theory alongside
• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. rival and correspondent of
• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. recruited for wartime research by
• Benoit Mandelbrot 1924–2010
  Developed fractal geometry during a long research career at IBM and Yale. influenced
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. attended the Macy conferences with