Norbert Wiener

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Lore & Background

Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Germany, respectively. His father, a linguist and tutor, educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention. Wiener graduated from Ayer High School in 1906 at age 11, entered Tufts College, and earned a BA in mathematics in 1909 at age 14. He began graduate studies in zoology at Harvard, then transferred to Cornell in 1910 to study philosophy, graduating in 1911 at 17. He returned to Harvard, where he was influenced by Edward Vermilye Huntington, and received a PhD in June 1913 at age 19 for a dissertation on mathematical logic. In that dissertation, he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory. In 1914, he traveled to Europe to be taught by Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and by David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. At Göttingen he also attended three courses with Edmund Husserl: one on Kant's ethical writings, one on the principles of Ethics, and the seminar on Phenomenology. During 1915–1916, he taught philosophy at Harvard, then was an engineer for General Electric and wrote for the Encyclopedia Americana. He was briefly a journalist for the Boston Herald, writing a feature story on poor labor conditions for mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but was fired soon afterwards for his reluctance to write favorable articles about a politician the newspaper's owners sought to promote.

Reader's Guide

Wiener's significance lies in his founding of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society. His work on stochastic and mathematical noise processes contributed to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. He is credited as being one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms that could possibly be simulated by machines, an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence. His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and others. In his 1913 PhD dissertation, he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory; in 1921, Kazimierz Kuratowski proposed a simplification of Wiener's definition that has been in common use ever since. Wiener's legacy endures across multiple disciplines, as cybernetics continues to inform systems thinking and AI research.

Did You Know?

• Wiener graduated from Ayer High School in 1906 at age 11 and earned a BA in mathematics from Tufts College in 1909 at age 14.
• He received his PhD from Harvard in June 1913 at age 19 for a dissertation on mathematical logic, in which he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory.
• In 1914, he studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and under David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen.
• He was briefly a journalist for the Boston Herald, writing a feature story on poor labor conditions for mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but was fired for refusing to write favorable articles about a politician.
• Wiener is credited as one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior results from feedback mechanisms that could be simulated by machines, an early step toward modern artificial intelligence.