Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography, available for the first time in one volume.
Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics combines for the first time the two volumes of Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography. Published at the height of public enthusiasm for cybernetics—when it was taken up by scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, artists, and musicians—Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956) received attention from both scholarly and mainstream publications, garnering reviews and publicity in outlets that ranged from the New York Times and New York Post to the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Norbert Wiener was a mathematician with extraordinarily broad interests. The son of a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, Wiener was reading Dante and Darwin at seven, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, and received a PhD from Harvard at eighteen. He joined MIT's Department of Mathematics in 1919, where he remained until his death in 1964 at sixty-nine. In Ex-Prodigy, Wiener offers an emotionally raw account of being raised as a child prodigy by an overbearing father. In I Am a Mathematician, Wiener describes his research at MIT and how he established the foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics and the theory of feedback systems. This volume makes available the essence of Wiener's life and thought to a new generation of readers.
Author(s): Norbert Wiener
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 511
Tags: cybernetics
Contents
Foreword
Notes
Bibliography
I Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
Dedication
Foreword to Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
Introduction
1 A Russian Irishman in Kansas City
2 The Proper Missourians
3 First Remembered Patterns
4 Cambridge to Cambridge, via New York and Vienna
5 In the Sweat of My Brow
Note
6 Diversions of a Wunderkind
7 A Child among Adolescents
8 College Man in Short Trousers
9 Neither Child nor Youth
Notes
10 The Square Peg
11 Disinherited
12 Problems and Confusions
Note
13 A Philosopher Despite Himself
Note
14 Emancipation
15 A Traveling Scholar in Wartime
16 Trial Run: Teaching at Harvard and the University of Maine
17 Monkey Wrench, Paste Pot, and the Slide Rule War
18 The Return to Mathematics
19 Epilogue
II I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
Dedication
Preface to I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
20 My Start as a Mathematician
21 The International Mathematical Congress of 1920 at Strasbourg
22 1920–1925. Years of Consolidation
Note
23 The Period of My Travels Abroad—Max Born and Quantum Theory
Notes
24 To Europe as a Guggenheim Fellow with My Bride
25 1927–1931. Years of Growth and Progress
26 An Unofficial Cambridge Don
27 Back Home
28 Voices Prophesying War
29 China and Around the World
30 The Days before the War
31 The War Years
32 Mexico
33 Moral Problems of a Scientist. The Atomic Bomb 1942–
34 Nancy, Cybernetics, Paris, and After
35 India
36 Epilogue
Index
