A house of learning
Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn. His father was a Jewish scholar born in 1862 in Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, who had studied in Warsaw and Berlin before emigrating to the United States, working on farms and in factories and finally becoming a professor of languages. His mother came from a German Jewish family in Missouri. When Norbert was small the family moved to Boston, where Leo eventually became professor of Slavic languages at Harvard.
“I was brought up in a house of learning,” Wiener wrote. His father, a formidable teacher who spoke many languages, took the boy’s education into his own hands, teaching him algebra instead of arithmetic and, when a doctor ordered the near-sighted child to stop reading for six months, drilling him in mathematics in his head. The results were extraordinary. Wiener graduated from Ayer High School in 1906, aged eleven, and from Tufts College with a degree in mathematics at fourteen. After false starts in zoology at Harvard and philosophy at Cornell, he earned a Harvard PhD in mathematical logic in 1913, at eighteen.
A prodigy finds his way
Being a child among adults was not easy, and Wiener later wrote frankly about his loneliness and his difficult relationship with his demanding father in his memoir Ex-Prodigy (1953). After his doctorate he studied with Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and with David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at Göttingen. Hardy’s influence pulled him from philosophy toward mathematics.
During the First World War he tried repeatedly to enlist and was rejected for poor eyesight, worked on artillery tables at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and finally joined the army as a private just before the war ended. Unable to get a permanent post at Harvard, which he attributed largely to antisemitism, he was hired in 1919 as an instructor in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stayed at MIT for the rest of his life.
Mathematics of noise
At MIT Wiener’s mathematics was driven by questions from engineers. In 1921 he gave the first rigorous mathematical description of Brownian motion, the random jiggling of tiny particles; the random process at its heart is still called the Wiener process and is used today in physics, engineering and finance. In the 1930s he developed generalised harmonic analysis, a way of breaking messy, irregular signals into their component frequencies, and important theorems that won him the American Mathematical Society’s Bôcher Prize in 1933.
A crucial idea ran through all of this: that a signal, like a voice on a telephone line or a radar echo, could be treated mathematically as a kind of random noise, and analysed with the tools of probability. That idea underlies much of modern communication engineering. In 1926 he married Margaret Engemann, a language teacher; they had two daughters. In 1935–36 he lectured at Tsinghua University in China.
War work and the Wiener filter
In the Second World War Wiener was asked by the National Defense Research Committee to help solve a deadly practical problem: how to aim anti-aircraft guns at fast, swerving bombers. To do it, a machine had to predict where a plane would be from noisy, incomplete radar data. Wiener’s answer, issued in 1942 as a classified report so mathematically dense that engineers nicknamed it the Yellow Peril, was a general theory for separating a signal from noise and predicting its future course as well as the past allows. Now called the Wiener filter, it became a foundation of signal processing, used to clean up signals in communications, radar, audio and images, and it paved the way for the filtering methods that followed.
Working on gun control, Wiener noticed that the human operator and the machine formed a single loop: the gunner watched the result, corrected his aim, and watched again. With the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth and the engineer Julian Bigelow, he published “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” in 1943, arguing that purposeful behaviour in animals and machines alike depends on feedback, information about results fed back to guide the next action.
Cybernetics
In 1948 Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, naming a new science from the Greek word for a steersman. It argued that the same principles of information and feedback govern thermostats, automatic pilots, nervous systems, and even societies. The book was hard going, full of equations and loose ends, but it found readers far beyond mathematics and spread a new vocabulary, feedback, input, output, information, through engineering, biology and the social sciences.
Wiener’s ideas shaped the work of John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, and through the Macy conferences reached the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. His suggestion that intelligent behaviour could be understood as feedback that machines might imitate was an early step toward artificial intelligence and robotics. In 1950 he wrote a popular version, The Human Use of Human Beings, insisting that the new machines must be designed to serve people rather than replace them.
A scientist rebels
Wiener became one of the first scientists to think seriously about the ethics of the technologies he helped create. Shaken by the atomic bomb, he published “A Scientist Rebels” in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1947, refusing to share his work with military projects and urging scientists to consider the consequences of their research. After the war he declined government and military funding altogether.
He also worried about workers. On August 13, 1949, he wrote to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, warning that automatic machinery would lead to the factory without employees and that, under the industrial system of the day, the resulting unemployment could only be disastrous. He told Reuther he had refused an industrial company’s request to help develop such machinery and offered his help to the labour movement instead. He advocated automation to raise living standards in poor countries and advised the government of India in the 1950s.
His ideas also helped people with disabilities. Recovering from a broken hip in the early 1960s, he suggested to his surgeon, Melvin Glimcher, that a prosthetic limb might be controlled by the body’s own electrical signals. Wiener introduced Glimcher to MIT engineers, and the collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard and Liberty Mutual produced the Boston Arm, demonstrated in 1968, one of the first artificial elbows driven by signals from the wearer’s muscles.
A Jew who learned it late
Wiener’s Jewish background was not hidden from the world, but it was kept from him. In Ex-Prodigy he described learning as a teenager that he was Jewish, a discovery that came as a shock and left him, he felt, unprepared to face antisemitism. He placed most of the responsibility for the secrecy on his mother, whose assimilated family had largely married outside the faith, and he came to resent what he saw as her prejudice against Jews.
Once he knew, he took his heritage seriously. He was proud of his father’s journey from the Russian Empire, traced the family to the great Talmudist Akiva Eger, and wrote with admiration about the Jewish tradition that made the young scholar a desirable match for a rich merchant’s daughter. He was not religious and was ambivalent about Zionism, regarding Jews primarily as a community with a long tradition of learning. In the 1930s he worked with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars to help refugee academics, many of them Jewish, find positions in America.
The absent-minded genius
Short, round and very near-sighted, Wiener became MIT’s most famous eccentric, the subject of countless stories about his absent-mindedness, some of which his family said were close to the truth. He was by most accounts a poor lecturer but an endlessly stimulating talker, and he shared his ideas freely, including with Soviet colleagues, which made him suspect during the Cold War. His doctoral students included Norman Levinson and Amar Bose, who later founded the Bose audio company. His two volumes of memoirs, Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956), remain unusually candid accounts of what it costs and means to grow up as a prodigy.
In January 1964 President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the National Medal of Science at the White House. Two months later, on March 18, 1964, Wiener died of a heart attack in Stockholm, aged 69. His last book, God and Golem, Inc., about cybernetics and religion, won the National Book Award in 1965.
Legacy
Wiener’s mathematics lives on in the Wiener process, the Wiener filter and the theorems that bear his name, used daily in engineering, telecommunications and science. His bigger legacy is a way of seeing: the idea that information and feedback link machines, bodies and societies, which runs through control engineering, robotics, neuroscience and computing.
Just as important, he was one of the first to ask what such machines would do to human beings, to work, to war and to freedom. The Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, given to computer professionals, honours that side of him. Decades before artificial intelligence became a household phrase, he argued that machines should be our servants, not our masters, and that the people who build them are responsible for how they are used.
Sources & further reading
Norbert Wiener, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews · Norbert Wiener, EBSCO Research Starters · Father of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener’s Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther, Libcom · The Boston Arm: An Early Myoelectric Prosthesis, IEEE Spectrum · Norbert Wiener, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.