Norbert Wiener

Born: 26 Nov 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, USA Died: 18 March 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden Norbert Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard at the age of 18 with a dissertation on mathematical logic. From Harvard to went to Cambridge, England then to Göttingen. After various occupations (journalist, university teacher, engineer, writer) in which he was very unhappy, he began a long association with MIT.

In 1919. His work on generalised harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems won the Bôcher Prize. Wiener had an extraordinarily wide range of interests and contributed to many areas including cybernetics (a term he coined), stochastic processes, quantum theory and during World War II he worked on gunfire control. His wide dealings with other scientists led him to say One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an adviser to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much from mathematics

He held that the U.S. had reached a stage in its economic development that should enable it to direct its resources more toward providing better public services and less to the production of consumer goods Two months before his death, in a ceremony at the White House, Norbert Wiener was awarded the National Medal of Science. The citation by President Johnson said: " . . . for marvelously versatile contributions, profoundly original, ranging within pure and applied mathematics, and penetrating boldly into the engineering and biological sciences."

Wiener felt that mathematicians, to be effective, need to realize that their labors are changing the nature of society. Most of Wiener's later mathematical work stemmed from his early interest in the study of irregularities and in his attempts to give meaningful mathematical descriptions of such irregularities, no matter where in nature they occur.