The MIT Press, 1976. — 774 p. — (Mathematicians of our time). — ISBN: 0262230704, 9780262230704Norbert Wiener's profound contributions encompassed not only several areas of mathematics, but mathematical philosophy, relativity and quantum mechanics, communication engineering, the physiology of the heart and the nervous system, brain wave encephalography, sensory prosthesis-the field now widely known as cybernetics. His scholarly work also included incisive social, educational, and literary essays. The object of these Collected Works is not only the reproduction of all his scholarly publications other than books, but the placement of the overwhelming bulk of these in the context of presentday research by means of commentaries, tracing both their genesis and aftermath, written by eminent contemporary scholars.
The papers are organized by coherence of subject matter rather than by chronology, so that Wiener's intellectual evolution may stand out. Volume I includes the three important categories of papers representative of his early work and its pursuance in later years. Its organization is described in the section Introduction and Acknowledgment (page 3). Volume II will deal with generalized and classical harmonic analysis and Tauberian theory. Volume III will cover the Hopf-Wiener equation, prediction and filtering, as well as relativity and quantum mechanics. Finally, Volume IV will include his philosophical, cybernetical, and sociological papers, commentaries, and reviews.
This volume and the ones to follow owe a great deal to a great many people. I have thanked the commentators for this volume for their very valuable contributions in appropriate places in the Introduction and Acknowledgment, and will continue this system of acknowledgment in the later volumes. But it remains to mention several other individuals and institutions without whose help this publication would have been severely handicapped.
