Norbert Wiener (1894--1964)

A very carefully brought up young man. His father, Leo Wiener, was a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, who had pronounced and peculiar views on education, and put them into effect on young Norbert. (Wiener père also had a crackpot theory about the African discovery of American c. 1000 A.D., but that's another story.) The net effect of these practices was that Norbert got his Bachelor's at the age of 14, and his Ph.D. (from — where else? — Harvard, in mathematical philosophy) at the age of 18, at which point he headed to Europe to study at Göttingen and Cambridge (under Russell). After various peregrinations he settled at the math department of MIT, where he did lots of good work on algebra and measures, at last finding his true home in stochastic processes and their applications to time series and the foundations of statistical mechanics.

In his younger years, he was (by his own account) a barely-ambulatory bundle of neuroses, and insufferable; he improved with age, to the point of being merely vain and arrogant. In all fairness, he had a lot to be arrogant about: in addition to his mathematics, he was one of the founders of cybernetics, and the man who coined the word (from the Greek kubernetes, steersman, whence also "governor"). He defined it as "the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine," and thought it was basically about information theory and feedback, and how animals and machines manage to do things; and he warned, as explicitly as possible, against using it for handwaving fluff in social science or philosophy. (These warnings were, naturally, ignored; but that is also another story.) He realized, of course, that understanding that would lead to better automatic machinery, with profound but unpredictable consequences, and he wrote a lot to try and make people think about them. (They didn't, but that's yet another story.) He was less than entirely successful as a prophet — for instance, automation has not yet resulted in mass unemployment — but nobody is or was, and his heart at least was in the right place.

Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death [By now a classic work, but really very horribly biased against Johnny]
Stephen Toulmin, "The Importance of Norbert Wiener"
by Wiener:
- Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18--24 [JSTOR]
- Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [You need good math to get all of it. What? You find this unreasonable? Read his introduction.]
- Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series [Read the appendices first.]
- God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
- The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society [His own math-free popularization of Cybernetics.]
- Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas
- Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory [Statistics of transducers, basically. Very hard going, but does reward the effort.]
- Selected Papers [Gives a good feel for the range of his mathematical work; but extremely technical]

Umberto Eco The Open Work [I don't see the connection, but the library does]
Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision", Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228--266 [JSTOR]
David Jerison, I. M. Singer, Daniel W. Stroock (eds.), The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: a Centennial Symposium in Honor of the 100th anniversary of Norbert Wiener's birth
Persi Masani, Norbert Wiener [Scientific biography]
V. Mandrekar and P. Masani (eds.), Proceedsings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994
Stephen Pfohl, The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener [Apparently more post-whatsit verbiage from CTHEORY. What does Sterling see in these people, anyway?]
Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener
- "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science 12 (1945): 316--321 [JSTOR]
- "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior", Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 318--326 [JSTOR]
NW
- The Fourier Integral and Certain of Its Applications
- Generalized Harmonic Analysis
- Tauberian Theorems

Notebooks

Norbert Wiener (1894--1964)