Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy

• Main Author: Wiener, Norbert
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge MIT Press 2018; The MIT Press
• Edition: 1
• Series: The MIT Press
• Subjects: American Mathematical Society; Analysis; Atomic bomb; autobiography; automation; Bell Telephone Laboratories; biography; Biography & Autobiography; Biography and non-fiction prose; Biography, Literature and Literary studies; Biography: general; Biography: science, technology and medicine; Cambridge University; Communication theory; Computing machines; cybernetics; Cybernetics and systems theory; DNBT1 Autobiography: science, technology and medicine; education; General Topics for Engineers; genius; Harmonic analysis; Harvard University; Humanities; Information theory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mathematician; Mathematicians; Mathematicians > United States > Biography; Mathematics & Statistics; Mathematics and Science; MIT; Nervous system and communication; Neurophysiology; Norbert Wiener; Popular and recreational mathematics; Popular science; probability and statistics; Prodigy; Quantum mechanics; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; Research and information: general; Science: general issues; scientist; Theory of Prediction; war; Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964; Bell Telephone Laboratories; probability and statistics; Prodigy; education; cybernetics; scientist; Computing machines; Norbert Wiener; Harmonic analysis; autobiography; Harvard University; automation; Theory of Prediction; Atomic bomb; war; biography; Mathematician; Nervous system and communication; Communication theory; Neurophysiology; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; genius; Cambridge University; Analysis; Quantum mechanics; MIT; American Mathematical Society
• ISBN: 0262535440; 9780262535441; 9780262347051; 0262347059
• DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/11597.001.0001

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.