Norbert Wiener-A Life in Cybernetics: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Mit Press) - Softcover

Wiener, Norbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262535440 ISBN 13: 9780262535441

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) served on the faculty in the Department of Mathematics at MIT from 1919 until his death. In 1963, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to mathematics, engineering, and biological sciences. He was the author of many books, including Norbert Wiener―A Life in Cybernetics and the National Book Award-winning God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (both published by the MIT Press).

Review

Norbert Wiener was the brilliant prophet of the doom and bliss of human-machine interaction. It is impossible to grasp the past and future obsession for the little networked computers in our pockets without studying Wiener's scripture.

―Thomas Rid, Professor of Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS; author of Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0262535440
• ISBN 13: 9780262535441
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 526