Get best of the week

Norbert Wiener. An interesting person. Colleagues, enemies, struggle for independence

His books “Former child prodigy”, “I am a mathematician”, “Cybernetics and society” I read recently. Too bad not much earlier. I have always been interested in researchers, scientists and inventors, who manifest themselves not only by achievements, but also by the way in which they achieved them, in which environment - colleagues and close people, discoveries were made.

Norbert, whom others considered a child prodigy, according to his father, was an ordinary child, and the skills he displayed were provided at the expense of his father’s teaching methodology. Norbert's father was a man with great abilities and at the same time tirelessly engaged in scientific research. By the way, Norbert’s father to study and intellectual work was a feat of Norbert’s grandfather - Wiener, who moved to the States from Russia. He insisted that his son, Norbert’s father, read, study and speak German, not Yiddish. As a result, the civilized and scientific world opened wider for him.

Norbert's father showed abilities in linguistics and mathematics, he was an expert in Slavic and other European languages, as well as Hebrew. As a professor of Slavic languages ​​at Harvard, he accomplished a scientific feat - without interruption from teaching for 2 years, he translated 24 volumes of Leo Tolstoy's works into English.

Norbert grew up under the strict control of his father, every day the student had to answer his father about the solved tasks in mathematics and languages.
He was several years younger than his classmates, but they did not laugh at him when the teacher in school put little Norbert on her lap.

In college, he was not his own among classmates, they already looked after the girls, they tasted alcohol at parties.

And only at the stage of Norbert’s education in college did it become difficult for the father to control his son’s progress in mathematics, the son surpassed his father in some of its areas. Norbert wrote in his memoirs about his father that, with all his achievements, perhaps he could be better realized in mathematics than in linguistics, due to the greater rigor of mathematical constructions.

Norbert himself chose philosophy for specialization, and his father encouraged him in this. How not to recall the name of Newton’s work “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” ...

At the university, he was also much younger than fellow students, and he did not have friends among them. At the end of the training, I had to look for a job. In America, competition has always been fierce. Norbert still received an invitation to one of the provincial universities for the position of teacher of mathematics. Moreover, many of the employees perceived the work in this educational institution as temporary, in case of waiting for a vacancy in any of the prestigious universities. Norbert lingered there briefly.

Under the patronage of one of his father’s friends, as well as a familiar physics teacher at Harvard, young Wiener was taken to one of the factories by General Electric, which produces engines, as an apprentice engineer. There, his knowledge and skills were appreciated, and he himself subsequently found this practice very useful when creating new mathematical methods for solving problems while developing new data transfer technologies. And also when writing the novel "The Tempter".

During the period of the Great Depression, with him, having the skills of successful theoretical work, but since childhood physically limited due to poor vision, there was such an incident. During a police strike in one of the cities, the mayor decided to show what everyday life would be like in the absence of police. But the volunteers, in the status of free strikebreakers, decided to become temporary law enforcement officers. Norbert got into one of the teams.

He recalls that for the first time in his life he felt a similar state when thoughts arose that he might have to shoot at people who violate the rule of law, marauders. His hand shook with a revolver in it. Fortunately, life in the city quickly returned to normal. It became clear to everyone what problems were caused by the complete absence of the police, and the regular police officers returned to service again.

The future father of cybernetics also had to work in one of the publishers. And this practice was very useful to him later, when he began to write books with his memoirs, as well as scientific and educational, which turned out to be very popular, and which began to bring him serious income. For it’s difficult for the teacher’s bid, even at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to have their own home, to pay for the education of children, without leaving the wife and her relatives.

In the scientific field, he, as is usually the case with the authors of innovative works, appeared envious. In the pre-war era, Germany was the mathematical mecca. And the University of Gottingen attracted brilliant scientists. In the States there was no strong mathematical school yet. Some mathematicians, who became famous thanks to their strong work, may have considered competitors' articles an attempt on their glory. Wiener mentioned that some of the scientists are hiding the current state of their research in order to impress other authors working on a similar topic with a new publication.

Of course, Wiener inherited the full program from Birkhoff, who was older than Wiener and already known for his achievements in the scientific world, who might have considered himself the forefather of American mathematics. And even at the very beginning of his career, Wiener, due to the talkativeness of one of the scientific mentors who supervised the work of graduate students, learned about the topic of theses being prepared, aimed at strengthening the prestige of the leader. He was interested in the scientific task from an aesthetic point of view, he acknowledged that he worked only on topics that promised elegant solutions. Wiener finished work on this topic even before the theses mentioned were published. When Norbert informed the head of research about this, the latter tried to convince him to wait, not outrunning the publication of articles by his own graduate students. This outraged Wiener,and here he firmly defended his own independence.

For all his continuing dependence on his father, he sharply protested against such pressure. So his character was forged and the life style in science was honed.
Wiener, who had already achieved fame, was invited by Courant to give a course of lectures in Göttingen. And being on the spot, he learned that he could only give lectures to students for free. Well, in life, ala ger com ala ger, anything can happen.

However, doing science gives joy that obscures one’s feelings of hostility. With all this, how cool it is to work with colleagues. After all, this is often possible, as Wiener himself noted, only in such abstract fields as mathematics or theoretical physics. Where it is customary to strive for complete order with the initial definitions.
Moreover, already in the prime of scientific activity, after he established a commonality in the functioning of living organisms and machines, in particular the presence of universal feedback, he collaborated with neurophysiologists, researchers of the nervous system and brain.

Wiener writes that his father spent his whole life seeking recognition in Europe, but it happened that he deserved it only in America. Wiener himself often, especially at the beginning of his career, experienced rejection in his homeland, in the States, and with his European colleagues he developed friendly relations and fruitful scientific contacts. For example, his scientific work was actively supported and assisted as a strictly expert by Jacob Tamarkin, who survived the dramatic period of emigration from Russia in the post-revolutionary period. The same Tamarkin, a classmate according to Petershula and a close friend of Alexander Fridman, the author of the concept of the unsteady Universe, who substantiated a new approach to Einstein's equations. And once Tamarkin, along with Friedman, were participants in the Paul Ehrenfest seminar at St. Petersburg University.

On the eve of the war, Wiener made many efforts to help emigrants from Europe. He helped some of them find work through personal contacts with representatives of American universities. Wiener also turned to Jewish foundations, but sometimes they refused to help, because those of the scientists who needed help did not want to recognize themselves as Jews. Probably, in the orthodox sense, it was a period of growth of the Zionist movement.

With two of his graduate students, one from China and the other from Japan, Wiener fumbled for many years as wards of his scientific school. For many years, the Chinese researcher Li improved the device, the concept of which they laid together with Wiener. As a result, Bell acquired the patent, and, as Wiener notes, it was not known to use it in practice. According to Wiener, this is the corporate tradition: to buy inventions that are potentially able to circumvent samples of long-established production.

For ten years, Lee, including the period of war, was divorced from scientific activity. After his return to the States from China, Wiener helped his colleague eliminate the inevitable in this regard, the backlog in a peculiar way. Due to the direction of the ward to research in new fields of science.

Traveling at the invitation of his European colleagues, who were not always familiar before, he sometimes stayed in their house. Scientific research brings scientists together, although, of course, not everyone is impartial to a particular person.

More articles:


All Articles