Mathematics: The Prodigy Who Grew Up

• Share

With his short, rotund figure and his spade beard, Professor Norbert Wiener of M.I.T. looked like a harmless Santa Claus. Instead he bristled with versatility. He was a top-rank mathematician who fathered a new branch of science, an enthusiastic mountain climber, and a facile writer of both fiction and philosophy. He could talk intelligently on almost any subject. When he died of a heart attack in Stockholm last week, his colleagues the world over testified to a special sense of loss. For Wiener was one of a vanishing crew—a first-rate scientist whose curiosity and skills covered a variety of disciplines.

"Fool! Brute!" Behind his jolly facade, Norbert Wiener carried the scars of a miserable youth as a child prodigy. His father, who was professor of Slavic languages at Harvard, took over the boy's early education, correcting each error with shouts of "Fool!", "Brute!", "Donkey!" Lessons often ended with the child in tears, the father raging so loudly that neighbors came to the door to complain.

Despite these agonies, or because of them—Wiener himself could not decide—the precocious child was reading ponderous books at the age of six. His shortsighted eyes almost went blind when he was eight, but he graduated from the Ayer, Mass., high school at twelve and got his B.A. from Tufts College at 15. Harvard gave him his doctorate in mathematics when he was 18 and kept him on as a lecturer.

Wiener eventually began to outgrow the effects of his hothouse education. He married happily and made an energetic entrance into the field of creative mathematics, the strange, unworldly specialty that he described brilliantly in I Am a Mathematician. Making his headquarters at M.I.T., he drifted from university to university, like a medieval scholar, but he remained almost a stranger in the vast world outside the classroom.

More Hits. Then came World War II, and Wiener went to work designing aiming, devices for antiaircraft guns. He demonstrated that gun sights are basically mathematical. Controlled by mechanisms based on far-out mathematical theorems, guns made more hits, radars tracked more targets. Wiener's work was invaluable, but he declared that he would never again touch military weapons. He stuck to his resolution despite bitter criticism.

In 1948 Wiener published his famous Cybernetics, which caused a still-continuing stir in scientific circles. The word cybernetics, which Wiener coined, is based on the Greek word for "steersman," and he made it stand for the science of control mechanisms that he showed to be part of neurology, psychology and many other disciplines. The human brain is a control mechanism; so are a computer, a missile's guidance system, even a simple household thermostat. All of them obey the rules that Wiener spelled out.

Devalued Brains. Cybernetics made Wiener famous. Even the Russians, who called him a "fat, cigar-smoking capitalist," adopted his ideas. Wherever he went he spoke eloquently of his fears that dependence on computers, if not carefully controlled, might someday devalue human brains.