Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener the American mathematician and philosopher (1894-1964) who founded the science of cybernetics. A prodigy who earned a doctorate at eighteen, he worked on stochastic processes, control and communication, and in his later years he articulated a vision of automatic systems that would inform computing, biology, engineering and social thought.

Early Life and Education

Norbert Wiener was born on 26 November 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant scholar, Leo Wiener, who was a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard. Pushed by his father, he was educated at home and entered Tufts College at eleven, graduating in 1909. He went on to graduate study at Harvard, studying zoology, philosophy and mathematics, and he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1913 at the age of eighteen.

He then travelled to Europe on a fellowship, studying under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy in Cambridge and under David Hilbert in Gottingen. On returning to the United States he held a series of short teaching posts before being drafted into the army during the First World War, where he worked briefly on ballistics and was struck by the difficulty of aiming at fast-moving targets. In 1919 he joined the mathematics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent the rest of his career.

Mathematical Work on Random Processes

Wiener made fundamental contributions to the mathematics of randomness. He constructed a rigorous model of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid, and he developed a theory of the integral that bears his name. This work on stochastic processes put the study of chance phenomena on a firm mathematical footing and became a tool used throughout physics, engineering and finance.

He also developed methods for extracting a signal from noise, known as the Wiener filter, and studied prediction and control in systems subject to random disturbance. These problems arose from practical concerns with anti-aircraft fire control and with communication, but he treated them with mathematical generality. His analysis of stationary time series and optimal filtering became central to the theory of signal processing and to the design of control systems.

Cybernetics

In 1948 Wiener published Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, the book that gave a name to a new field. Drawing on work with the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth and the engineer Julian Bigelow, he argued that the concepts of feedback, information and control apply equally to living organisms and to machines. The central notion was that purposeful behaviour can be understood as a process in which a system regulates itself by comparing its actual state with a goal and correcting the difference.

The idea of negative feedback, in which a system uses information about its output to adjust its behaviour, unified phenomena as different as the regulation of body temperature and the operation of a servomechanism. Wiener showed that the same mathematical description could serve for both, and he proposed that the study of such systems deserved to be a science in its own right. Cybernetics drew together mathematicians, engineers, biologists and psychologists, and it influenced the young fields of computing and artificial intelligence.

Ethics and the Human Use of Machines

Wiener was among the first to reflect seriously on the social and ethical consequences of automation. In The Human Use of Human Beings, published in 1950, he warned that automatic machinery could displace workers and concentrate power, and he argued that the new technology should be judged by human values rather than by efficiency alone. He called on scientists to consider the uses to which their work might be put.

He declined to take part in work whose purpose he thought morally questionable, and he wrote essays on the responsibilities of the scientist and on the danger of surrendering decisions to machines. His concern that automated systems could be used for dehumanizing purposes, and his insistence that human beings should remain the ends rather than the means of technological development, gave the field of computing an early and influential ethical conscience.

Influence and Legacy

Wiener received the National Medal of Science and the Bocher Prize, and his ideas spread through many disciplines. Cybernetics influenced robotics, control engineering, cognitive science and the counterculture of the 1960s as well as mainstream artificial intelligence, though its distinct identity was later partly absorbed into these fields. His mathematical work on stochastic processes and filtering remains foundational.

He was a famously eccentric and restless thinker, moving readily between the technical and the philosophical, and he wrote both a scholarly autobiography and a novel. He died on 18 March 1964. He is remembered as the founder of cybernetics and as a rare mathematician who thought deeply about the purposes to which mathematics and machines are put, warning early of the social consequences of automation.

See also

• Cybernetics
• Feedback
• Stochastic process
• Wiener filter