🚶🏻 📆 🍞 Norbert Wiener: the distracted father of cybernetics 👆🏽 👩‍🏭 😼

When did we meet, did I go to or from a student club? I ask, because in the second case I already had lunch.

The American mathematician Norbert Wiener was a peculiar person in all respects. After graduating from high school at 11 years old, he entered Tufts College and only three years later became a bachelor of mathematics. Even before coming of age, Harvard awarded Wiener a doctorate for his dissertation in mathematical logic. Here is the characteristic that Sylvia Nazar gives him:

American John von Neumann, an outstanding scholar who made an amazing contribution to pure mathematics, and then began a second and equally startling career in applied mathematics.

Wiener was the very person who introduced the modern meaning of the word “feedback”, inventing cybernetics, and cybernetics, in turn, gave birth to such revolutionary concepts as artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, neurology (in the key to neural networks ) and many others.

But, despite the colossal achievements in the scientific field, Wiener was much more remembered by contemporaries for his unusual personal qualities. According to his biography, this great man spent 30 years “wandering the corridors of MIT with a duck walk.” Without a doubt, he was one of the most absent-minded mathematicians in the world.

His office was a few steps down the hall from mine and he often came to me to talk. When my office was moved to another place a few years later, he stopped by to introduce himself. He did not understand that I was the very man whom he had visited so often; I was in the new office, so he thought that I was someone else.
- Phyllis L. Block

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(1894-1909)

Norbert Wiener at the age of seven, 1901

Norbert Wiener was born in 1894 in Missouri, into a Jewish family. His father, Leo Wiener, at the time of the birth of his son was already a well-known learned historian and linguist. In 1880, he graduated from the University of Warsaw, and then the University of Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm. As a polyglot, Norbert's father was fluent in several languages. As Norbert himself writes in his autobiography Ex Prodigy, multilingualism was almost a tradition during his father’s childhood:

German was the language of the family, and Russian was the language of the state. [...] He learned French as the language of a cultural society; and in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, there were still those who, in the best traditions of the Renaissance, preferred Italian for cultural communication.

However, his father elevated this tradition to absolute. By the age of ten, Leo could already speak in a dozen languages without any problems. During his life, he mastered about 34 languages, including Gaelic, various Indian dialects, and even the language of the African group of Bantu peoples.

Leo and Berthe Wiener My

wife and mother Norbert Leo met while working as a teacher in Kansas City. In 1883 he proposed to her. As the residents of the town in which the couple settled recalled, Berta was “a short, pretty woman, [...] practical, sociable and economic”. They married in 1893, just a year before the birth of Norbert. The name of the son was given in honor of the main character of the drama poem Robert Browning "On the Balcony."

Gifted boy

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Nine-year-old Norbert Wiener Norbert

's mother from an early age read books to him. And by the age of three, Norbert himself could read aloud for her. Leo, who had by then become a professor at Harvard, began to gradually teach him subjects from his field. Young Norbert was very fond of science books and as a gift for his third birthday received a copy of Wood's Natural History, which he literally swallowed in just a few days.
Education under the guidance of his father began in preschool age. As Norbert later recalled, his lessons consisted mainly of informal lectures on the profile of his father (i.e. languages and literature), including Greek and Roman classics, the beloved German poets Leo and the works of philosophers such as Darwin and Huxley. For a moment, Norbert was not even six years old!
Despite the fact that his son was extremely gifted, Leo was a demanding teacher and immediately set the bar high. When Norbert was mistaken, his father immediately became "incredibly critical and harsh." Here is what he writes in his autobiography:

Algebra has always been easy for me, although the methods my father chose to teach hardly contributed to my peace of mind. Each error should be corrected immediately. A conversation with him could begin in a calm and friendly tone - but right up to the moment I was mistaken for the first time. Immediately from a gentle and loving father, he turned into a blood enemy.

Despite his very young age and physical immaturity, by the age of seven his father sent Norbert to study at the progressive Peabody School (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Without regard to age, he immediately entered the third grade, and was soon transferred to the fourth, but some problems arose. His reading skills were impeccable, but paradoxically, his interest in mathematics began to fade. Realizing that this was due to the fact that Norbert was bored with cramming exercises, Leo immediately took him out of school and continued his “radical experiment in home schooling” for another three years.

The most outstanding boy in the world (1906)

New York World cover

The world first learned about Norbert Wiener on October 7, 1906, when a portrait of a genius boy appeared on the front page of New York World under the headline "The Most Outstanding Boy in the World." The article included interviews with Norbert and his father, filed in a tone of clear endorsement of Leo's unconventional approach to early childhood development:

Boy Norbert learned all the letters in eighteen months. Under the guidance of his father, he began to read [in English] at three, in Greek and Latin - at five, and soon also in German. At seven, he studied chemistry, at nine - algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, botany and zoology, and this fall, at eleven, he entered Tufts College in the neighboring city of Medford after only three and a half years of formal training.
- excerpt from the article “The Most Outstanding Boy in the World” in New York World, October 7, 1906.

Relations between Norbert and Leo

My closest mentor and dearest opponent.

Here is what physicist Freeman Dyson writes in his essay Tragic History of Genius in The New York Review of Books, 2005:

While he was growing, trying to avoid the stigma of a gifted kid from Tufts and Harvard, Leo only aggravated everything, shouting about Norbert's success in all newspapers and magazines.

That was exactly how it was: Leo's father trumpeted about his ideas in the field of education: in addition to an article in the New York World, he wrote in the Boston Evening Record, the American Journal of Pediatrics and American Magazine. Leo Wiener even “did not hide the fact that he deliberately grows geniuses from Norbert and his sisters.

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According to Leo's methodology, his public statements differed significantly from what he was saying to his own son. For example, if you read the own notes of Father Norbert about how his children became so talented, one gets the feeling that praise and recognition of the abilities of children in his picture of the world played a very insignificant role.

It is foolish to say, as many do, that Norbert, Constance, and Berta are unusually gifted children. Nothing like this. If they know more than other children of their age, it is only because they were taught differently.

On the left is Leo Wiener, on the right is Norbert’s dedication to his bestselling father, “The Human Use of Human Beings.”

Moreover, Norbert’s own writings make it clear that his father’s statements negatively affected him:

I felt that my father did not escape the temptation to give interviews about me and my training [...]. In these interviews, he emphasized that I was essentially an ordinary boy who was excellently trained.

The feeling that his father literally “created” him, combined with the lack of recognition of his talents, efforts and sacrifices, left an indelible mark on Wiener.
However, from an interview with Leo in an article in the New York World, it becomes clear that his father actually understood how gifted his son was, but he did not want to admit it under Norbert:

I do not like to talk about my son, but not at all because I am not proud of him, but because it can reach his ears and ruin him. He has a keen analytical mind and fantastic memory. He learns not just through cramming, like a parrot, but reasoning.

Education (1903-1913)

After home schooling with his father at the age of 9, Norbert entered Ayer High School, and then went even further:

It soon became clear that most of my studies were in the third year of high school, so when the year ended, I was transferred to high school.

After graduating in 1906, his father “decided [...] to send him to Tufts College so as not to expose him to the risky burden of entrance exams at Harvard.” Norbert, who at that time was 12, diligently obeyed his father.

Tufts University (1906–1909)

Still very young Wiener entered Tufts College in Massachusetts in the fall of 1906. He studied Greek and German, physics, mathematics, and biology there:

Despite my interest in biology, I received a mathematical higher education. I studied math every year in college [...], finding calculus and differential equations quite easy. I used to discuss them with my father, who was well versed in the regular college math program.

He graduated from Tufts with honors and received a bachelor's degree in 1909 when he was 14 years old.

Graduation photographs from Tufts College in 1909 and Harvard University in 1913

Harvard University (1909–1913)

I was almost fifteen years old, and I decided to try my hand at a doctorate in biology.

After graduating from college, Wiener entered graduate school at Harvard University (where his father worked) to study zoology. And this despite the objections of Leo, who “did not give his consent. He thought I could go to medical school. ” However, working in the laboratory, combined with Wiener's poor eyesight, made zoology extremely difficult for him. Norbert's “riot” did not last long, and after a while he decided to follow his father’s advice and study philosophy.

As usual, this decision was made by my father. He decided that the success that I achieved as a student at Tufts University in the field of philosophy clearly speaks of my true career. I had to become a philosopher.

Wiener was offered a scholarship to the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and transferred there in 1910. However, after this “black year”, during which he felt insecure and inappropriate, he returned to Harvard University. Initially, he intended to work with the philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916) to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, but due to his illness, Wiener had to turn to his former professor from Tufts College, Karl Schmidt. Schmidt, as Wiener later wrote, was then "a young man eagerly interested in mathematical logic." It was he who inspired Wiener to compare Ernst Schroeder's relational algebra (1841–1902) and Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica.
His dissertation on philosophy, highly mathematical, was devoted to formal logic. Key results were published in the next 1914 in the article “Simplification in the logic of relations” in the works of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The following fall, Wiener went to Europe for postdoctoral work in the hope that he would eventually be able to take a permanent position at the faculty of one of America's most famous universities.

Postdoctoral work (1913-1915)

After defending his doctoral dissertation and graduating from Harvard, eighteen-year-old Wiener was awarded the prestigious opportunity to study abroad for a year. He chose British Cambridge.

Cambridge University (1913-1914)

Leo Wiener brought his son to Bertrand Russell by the handle

Norbert Wiener arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in September 1913. His whole family came with him under the leadership of his father, Leo, who regarded the chance to join his son in Europe as an extraordinary Shabbat. As Conway and Siegelman write, “young Wiener stepped into the gates of Trinity College, the mecca of modern philosophy and new mathematical logic, and his father followed him.”
Wiener went to Cambridge to continue studying philosophy with one of the authors of Principia Mathematica, which was the subject of his Harvard dissertation. Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), at that time a forty-year-old man, by 1913 was considered the most progressive philosopher of the Anglo-American world, whose monumental three-volume work, written in collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1910, 1912 and 1913, was warmly accepted by the scientific community. Principia (or PM, as it is often called in abbreviated form) at that time was the most complete and consistent work on mathematical philosophy.
Despite the fact that Norbert brought up the polyglot Leo, his first impression of Russell with his fierce disposition left much to be desired. He later wrote to his father:

Russell’s attitude [towards me] seems to me a mixture of indifference and contempt. I think I will be quite pleased with what I see at his lectures.

In turn, Russell’s impression of Wiener, or at least what he demonstrated, seems very symmetrical. “Obviously, the young Wiener does not perceive information, does not engage in philosophy in the manner that the titanium Trinity prescribes.”

Excerpt from a letter from Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener (1913):

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In fact, Russell’s opinion of Norbert was not as harsh as it seemed (which, unfortunately, could not be said about Leo). In his personal documents, Russell approvingly noted the young man, and after reading the dissertation, Norbert said that this was “very good technical work” and presented him with a copy of the third volume “PM”.
However, the most important thing that Wiener brought out of his joint work with Russell had nothing to do with physics or philosophy. By God's will, Wiener caught the eye of four articles in 1905 by physicist Albert Einstein, whose ideas he later used in his work. Wiener himself singled out G.Kh. Hardy (1877–1947) as a scientist who had the most profound influence on him:

Hardy's course [...] was a revelation to me [...] [in his] attention to rigor [...] For all the years of listening to lectures on mathematics, I have never met anyone Hardy's equal in clarity of presentation, nor in fascination, nor in intellectual power. If we talk about someone as my master in the field of mathematical thinking, it should be G.Kh. Hardy.

In particular, Wiener thanked Hardy for introducing him to the Lebesgue integral, which "led me straight to the main achievement of my new career."

University of Gottingen (1914)

Having gained another portion of experience, in 1914 Wiener continued to study already at the University of Gottingen. He arrived there in the spring, making only a short stop in Munich to meet his family. He will study there for only one semester, but this period will be crucial for all his further development as a mathematician. Wiener takes up the study of differential equations under the direction of David Hilbert (1862–1943), possibly the most outstanding mathematician of his era, whom Wiener would later call the “truly universal genius of mathematics”.
Wiener remained in Göttingen until the outbreak of World War I, until June 1914, and then decided to return to Cambridge and continue studying philosophy with Russell.

Career (since 1915)

Before Wiener was admitted to MIT, where he remained until the end of his life, he had the opportunity to work on several casual jobs in various industries and cities. He officially returned to the United States in 1915, lived for some time in New York, continuing to study philosophy at Columbia University with the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). After that, he taught a philosophy course at Harvard and went on to work as a junior engineer at General Electric. After his father got a full-time writer there, “making sure that with his clumsiness he would never succeed in engineering,” Norbert joined Encyclopedia Americana in Albany, New York. Wiener also worked for the Boston Herald for some time.
When America entered the First World War, Wiener wanted to do his bit and in 1916 visited the training camp for officers, but ultimately failed the commission. In 1917, he again tried to join the army, but again unsuccessfully, this time due to poor vision. A year later, the mathematician Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) invited Wiener to help the front and work on ballistics in Maryland:

I received an urgent telegram from Professor Oswald Veblen from a new test site in Aberdeen, Maryland. This was my chance to do real military work. The next train I went to New York, where I took the express train to Aberdeen.

Mathematicians at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1918

Experience in the testing ground, as Dyson writes, transformed Wiener. Prior to his arrival, he was a 24-year-old math prodigy who was discouraged from math due to his unsuccessful teaching experience at Harvard. He returned back inspired by how everything that he had learned could be applied in solving real world problems:

We lived in a strange atmosphere, where the position, army rank and academic degree were of [equal] importance, and the lieutenant could address the rank and file, calling him “doctor,” or follow the orders of the sergeant. When we were not busy working on noisy machines for manual computing, which we called “crashers,” we played bridge for hours and recorded the results on the same machines. Whatever we do, we always talked about math.

Mathematics (since 1914)

In an extensive list of published works, Wiener's first two articles on mathematics (currently the second has been lost) appeared in the seventeenth edition of the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society of 1914:

Wiener, N. (1914). “A Simplification of the Logic of Relations”. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 17, pp. 387-390.
Wiener, N. (1914). “A Contribution to the Theory of Relative Position”. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 17, pp. 441–449.

However, the most famous mathematical works of Wiener were written by him mainly at the age of 25 to 50 years, that is, in 1921-1946.
After the end of World War I, Wiener tried to gain a position at Harvard, but was rejected, probably due to anti-Semitic sentiments prevailing at the university at that time, which was often associated with the influence of G. D. Birkhoff (1884–1944). Instead, in 1919, Wiener became a lecturer at MIT. From this moment, the effectiveness of his research has increased significantly.

In the first five years of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he published 29 (!!) journal articles, notes, and posts in various areas of mathematics, signed by one author. Among them:

Wiener, N. (1920). “A Set of Postulates for Fields”. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 21, pp. 237–246.
Wiener, N. (1921). “A New Theory of Measurement: A Study in the Logic of Mathematics”. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, pp. 181–205.
Wiener, N. (1922). “The Group of the Linear Continuum”. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, pp. 181–205.
Wiener, N. (1921). “The Isomorphisms of Complex Algebra”. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 27, pp. 443–445.
Wiener, N. (1923). “Discontinuous Boundary Conditions and the Dirichlet Problem”. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, pp. 307–314.

(1920-23)

Wiener first became interested in the Brownian movement when he studied at Cambridge with Russell. He introduced Wiener to the work of Albert Einstein. In his 1905 work, Uber die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in Ruhended Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen, Einstein modeled the unusual movement of a pollen particle under the influence of individual water molecules. This “unusual movement” was first observed by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827, but has not yet been formally investigated in mathematics.

Wiener approached this phenomenon from the point of view that “it would be mathematically interesting to develop a measure of probability for sets of trajectories”:

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Wiener expanded the formulation of Einstein's Brownian motion to describe these trajectories, and thus established a connection between the Lebesgue measure (a systematic way of assigning numbers to subsets) and statistical mechanics. That is, Wiener provided a mathematical formulation for the description of one-dimensional curves left by Brownian processes. His work, now often called the Wiener process in his honor, was published in a series of articles developed between 1920 and 1923:

Wiener, N. (1920). “The Mean of a Functional of Arbitrary Elements.” Annals of Mathematics 22 (2), pp. 66–72.
Wiener, N. (1921). “The Average of an Analytic Functional.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 7 (9), pp. 253-260.
Wiener, N. (1921). “The Average of an Analytic Functional and the Brownian Movement”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 7 (10), pp. 294–298.
Wiener, N. (1923). “Differential Space”. Journal of Mathematics and Physics 2, pp. 131–174.
Wiener, N. (1924). “The Average Value of a Functional”. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22, pp. 454–467.

, 1925

(1924–1926)

Due to the nature of his work, in the early 1920s every summer from 1924 to 1926, Wiener returns to Göttingen, and in the last year as a laureate of a Guggenheim scholarship. In the midst of the so-called golden age of quantum physics, his stay in Göttingen coincided with the visits of von Neumann (whom Wiener personally knew and corresponded with him) and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

In the summer of 1925, Wiener gave a group of mathematicians, both students and volunteers, in Göttingen, lecturing about his work, and later wrote home that Hilbert said about his work sehr schön ("very good"). By the end of Wiener's stay at the university, the head of the faculty of mathematics, Richard Courant (1888–1972), told him that if he returned next year, he would receive the position of visiting professor.

Wiener-Khinchin Theorem (1930)

Immediately after Göttingen, Wiener began working in the field of applied mathematics, and in 1930 - on the so-called autocorrelation functions, which provide a correlation between a signal and a delayed copy of this signal depending on the delay. The Wiener – Khinchin theorem shows how the autocorrelation function Rₓₓ (τ) is related to the power spectral density Sₓₓ (f) through the Fourier transform:

The result was published in the same year, and Wiener was promoted to associate professor MIT:

Wiener, N. (1930). “Generalized Harmonic Analysis.” Acta Mathematica. 55, pp. 117–258.

Left - Norbert Wiener, right - table of contents of the work “Generalized Harmonic Analysis”

Tauberian Wiener theorem (1932)

Despite the fact that by the beginning of the 30s he was already seriously engaged in signal processing and the first developments in the field of electrical engineering, Wiener continued to publish articles on pure mathematics, including work on the analysis of Lebesgue spaces. The Wiener Tauberian theorem, published in 1932, provides a necessary and sufficient condition under which any function in L₁ or L₂ can be approximated by linear combinations of shifts of this function.

Norbert Wiener in his office at MIT

Paley - Wiener Theorems (1934)

Wiener led several PhDs. One of them, Norman Levinson (1912–1975), talks about his experience working with a great man:

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The field of science, which is now inseparable from the name of Wiener, was largely the result of Norbert's interest in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, which are considered both in electrical engineering and in communication theory. In a lecture entitled People, Cars, and the World Around Them, Wiener says that his pioneering work came as a result of an attempt to contribute to the military operations of the 1940s:

There were two converging streams of ideas that led me to cybernetics. One of them is the fact that during the last war, when it was already clearly going, but, in any case, before Pearl Harbor, when we were not yet involved in the conflict, I tried to find out if I could find my place in military operations of that time.

As Wiener himself states in his lecture, his first experiments in the nascent theory of digital computing then did not yield enough results to be useful in the conduct of this war, so Wiener began to look for something new. His second initiative was related to armaments, in particular to air defense:

I looked around and noticed that air defense was an important topic at that time. It was [...] a time when the survival of at least someone who could fight Germany seemed to depend on air defense.
Yes, the anti-aircraft gun is a very interesting tool. During World War I, the anti-aircraft gun was designed for firing, but range tables were still needed on hand to fire. This meant that it was necessary to calculate everything while the plane flies directly overhead. And by the time you were able to do something, the plane was already out of sight.

So, Wiener continues, “this leads to very interesting mathematical theories. I found some ideas that later proved my worth. ” He worked on this issue with Julian Bigelow (1913–2003).

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Wiener and Bigelow saw the gunner, gun, plane and pilot as an integrated probabilistic system. Probability theory was on the pilot's side: in 1940, only one of the approximately 2,500 anti-aircraft missiles hit the target. In a preliminary report, they explained that they intend to “put the analysis of the forecasting problem on a purely statistical basis, determining to what extent the target’s movement is predictable based on known facts and observation history, and to what extent the target’s movement is unpredictable.
- excerpt, Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, 2012

An audio recording of Wiener's lecture, People, Cars, and the World Around Them, 1950, Wiener begins to speak at 13:30.

Wiener Filter (1942)

Wiener's work on the problem of controlling anti-aircraft fire led to the invention of a filter used to calculate the statistical estimate of an unknown signal by receiving it at the input and filtering at the output. The filter is based on several results of Wiener's past work on the topic of integrals and Fourier transforms. Although the filter was developed at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the result was published only in a secret document. The first open document describing the filter appeared in Wiener's 1949 book, Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series.
The war ended, and in 1947 Wiener was invited to the Harmonic Analysis Congress, which was held in Nancy, France. The congress was organized by the secret French mathematical society, Bourbaki, in collaboration with the mathematician Scholem Mandelbrot (1899–1983), the uncle of Benoit Mandelbrot (1925–2010), who later discovered the Mandelbrot set. Wiener was invited to write a paper on "the unifying nature of that part of mathematics that is found in the study of Brownian motion and telecommunication engineering." The following year, Wiener came up with the neologism "cybernetics" to mean the study of such "teleological mechanisms." His manuscript will serve as the basis for the popular science work “Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine,” published by MIT Press / Wiley and Sons in 1948.The book received the following reviews:

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In fact, the world is full of testimonies from various people who at different times came across this great man. He was always immersed in his own thoughts and did not pay attention to others.

As far as I remember, Professor Wiener always came to classes without any lecture notes. First of all, he took out his wide handkerchief and very energetically, noisily blowing his nose. He practically did not pay attention to students and quite occasionally announced what, in fact, would be a lecture. He stood facing the board, almost close to it, because he was very short-sighted. Even from the first row I could hardly see what he was writing. Most students did not see anything at all.
- excerpt, Recollections of a Chinese Physicist by CK Jen, 1990

At least once he entered a foreign class and enthusiastically delivered a lecture in front of a group of students who did not understand anything.
In the essay collection Mathematical Conversations - Selections from the Mathematical Intelligencer, writer and mathematician Stephen G. Krantz tells a short story to illustrate Wiener's behavior:

Walking along the corridors of MIT, he was always busy with a book, and in order not to go astray, he led along the wall with his finger. Once, extremely keen on this process, Wiener walked past the audience, where the lesson was taking place at that moment. It was hot and the door was left open. But, of course, Wiener had no idea about these nuances. Following his finger, he entered the door, circled the room right behind the lecturer, and went out the door the same way.

An Evening in Honor of Wiener, 1961

Biographers Conway and Siegelman trace Wyner's devotion to eccentricity during his work at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he first "saw a magnificent stronghold of high intellect and a dying aristocracy around him, raising eccentricity in the form of art" . Unlike Harvard, in which, according to Wiener, "eccentricity and individuality were always hated," at Cambridge, "eccentricity was so highly valued that even those who did not actually have it were forced to create it to save face." This opinion was also supported by biographer Sylvia Nazar, describing the hot atmosphere of the MIT faculty of mathematics in the 1950s:

Bragging was not considered a crime if you knew your subject. The lack of social grace was considered an integral part of the personality of a real mathematician.
- excerpt from the book "Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nazar, 1998

A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was driving around New Hampshire and stopping to help a chubby man with a flat tire. He recognized Norbert Wiener in him and inquired how he could help him. Wiener asked if [the graduate] knew him. “Yes,” said the graduate, “I took your course in computing.” “Have you passed it successfully?” - asked Wiener. "Yes". “Then you can help me,” Wiener said.
- Robert C. Witerall, Vice President of MIT Alumni

Of course, his eccentricity only fueled the legend of Professor Norbert Wiener of MIT:

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If my child or grandson is as anxious as I, I will have to take them to a psychoanalyst, if not with the certainty that the treatment will be successful, then at least with the hope that they will find some kind of understanding and get relief
- Norbert Wiener

From the memoirs of people who knew Wiener, as well as from his own autobiographies, it becomes clear that he was struggling with an inferiority complex. Most likely, these feelings are connected with the upbringing that he received from Leo, his father. They go beyond purely mathematical problems and other components of his life:

When at lunch he played bridge with friends, he always said every time he made a bet or played: “Am I right? Did I play well? ” His colleague, Norman Levinson, patiently reassured Wiener each time because he could do nothing better.
- Stephen G. Krantz, 1990

Indeed, Wiener was an anxious person. According to Nazar, he anxiously asked if his name appears in books that people read:

In the most difficult days, he became a victim of paralyzing depressions, which often made him threaten suicide with his family, and sometimes his colleagues at MIT.
- Nazar, 1998

Having become famous, he pursued his faculty colleagues to find out what MIT employees thought of him. If he met people from other institutions, his first question was: “What do you think of my work?”
- Conway and Siegelman, 2005

According to the famous Nobel laureate, economist Paul Samuelson (1915-2009), who also worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the lack of recognition from Harvard also did not improve the situation:
Wiener himself, which is not surprising, believed that understanding of mental illness in society could significantly advance thanks new computers like the human brain:

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Norbert Wiener plays chess with his daughter Peggy

Wiener's parents in 1926 artificially arranged the marriage of Norbert with an immigrant from Germany named Margaret Engemann. Despite this circumstance, the couple stayed together for the rest of their lives, and they had two children: Barbara and Margaret, who was called Peggy at home. They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite self-doubt, distraction, and a tendency to depression, Wiener was reputedly a good father and a great friend:

Wiener took his fatherly duties seriously and, in particular, sought to avoid the teaching method imposed on him by his own father.
- excerpt, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Steve J. Hames, 1980

In fact, history holds a lot of evidence that Wiener was a caring and caring person.

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The widow of his graduate student Norman Levinson told how in the autumn of 1933 Wiener organized a school year for Levinson in England, so that he, like Norbert, studied higher mathematics with G. H. Hardy in Cambridge, and even took care of his parents when Levinson left . Wiener visited Levinson's parents while he was in England, and tried to encourage them. As a rule, he came to them on Saturdays and talked with them not about his theorems, but about pleasant everyday things, about England and much more.

Norbert Wiener with his wife Margaret, daughters Peggy and Barbara and son-in-law Gordon Riceback

Death (1964)

Norbert Wiener died of a heart attack on March 18, 1964 in Stockholm, where he lectured at the Royal Academy of Sciences. He was 69 years old.

When the news reached MIT, all work stopped, and people gathered to share news and memories with each other. The flags of the institute were lowered to the middle of the flagpole, saluting the untimely departed professor who had been wandering the corridors of the institute for more than forty-five years
- excerpt, “The Dark Hero of the Information Age”, Conway and Siegelman, 2005

This article is part of a series of math materials published in the Cantor's Paradise weekly edition.

Norbert Wiener: the distracted father of cybernetics