, Mathematician, Philosopher
Norbert Wiener (born Norbert Wiener; November 26, 1894, Columbia, Missouri, USA - March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) - American scientist of Jewish origin, an outstanding mathematician and philosopher, the founder of cybernetics and the theory of artificial intelligence.
Norbert Wiener was born into a Jewish family. The parents of the mother, Bertha Kahn, came from Germany. The scientist's father, Leo Wiener (1862 - 1939), studied medicine in Warsaw and engineering in Berlin, and after moving to the United States, he eventually became a professor in the department of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard University.
The discipline of a scientist is that he devotes himself to the search for truth. This discipline gives rise to the desire to make any sacrifices - be it material sacrifices or even, in extreme cases, a sacrifice of one’s own safety.
Wiener Norbert
At the age of 4, Wiener was already admitted to his parents' library, and at the age of 7 he wrote his first scientific treatise on Darwinism. Norbert never really went to high school. But at the age of 11, he entered the prestigious Taft College, from which he graduated with honors three years later, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree.
At the age of 18, Norbert Wiener was already listed as a Doctor of Science in mathematical logic at Cornell and Harvard universities. At the age of nineteen, Dr. Wiener was invited to the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1913, young Wiener began his journey through Europe, listening to lectures by Russell and Hardy in Cambridge and Gilbert in Göttingen. After the outbreak of war, he returns to America. While studying in Europe, the future “father of cybernetics” had to try his hand at being a journalist for a university newspaper, try himself in the teaching field, and serve for a couple of months as an engineer at a factory.
The most perfect model of a cat is the same cat, or better yet, itself.
(Philosophy of Science 1945)
Wiener Norbert
In 1915, he tried to go to the front, but failed the medical examination due to poor eyesight.
Since 1919, Wiener became a teacher at the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 20s and 30s he visited Europe again. The Wiener-Hopf equation appears in the theory of radiative equilibrium of stars. He lectures at Beijing Tsinghua University. Among his acquaintances are N. Bor, M. Born, J. Hadamard and other famous scientists.
The feeling of an inextricable connection with the past... depends not only on knowledge of chronicle history... striving for a worthy future, one should remember the past, and if there are entire regions where awareness of the past is crumpled to the size of a barely noticeable point on a huge map, then nothing can be worse than for ourselves and for our descendants...
Wiener Norbert
In 1926 he married Margaret Engerman.
Before the Second World War, Wiener became a professor at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Göttingen universities, received his own undivided chair at the Massachusetts Institute, wrote hundreds of articles on probability theory and statistics, on Fourier series and integrals, on potential theory and number theory, on generalized harmonic analysis... During the Second World War, to which the professor wished to be drafted, he worked on a mathematical apparatus for anti-aircraft fire guidance systems (deterministic and stochastic models for the organization and control of the American air defense forces). He developed a new effective probabilistic model for controlling air defense forces.
Wiener's Cybernetics was published in 1948. The full title of Wiener's main book is “Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine.”
A few months before his death, Norbert Wiener was awarded the Scientist's Gold Medal, the highest honor for a man of science in America. At a ceremonial meeting dedicated to this event, President Johnson said: “Your contributions to science are surprisingly universal, your views have always been completely original, you are a stunning embodiment of the symbiosis of the pure mathematician and the applied scientist.” At these words, Wiener took out a handkerchief and blew his nose thoughtfully.
Norbert Wiener - photo
Norbert Wiener - quotes
The discipline of a scientist is that he devotes himself to the search for truth. This discipline gives rise to the desire to make any sacrifices - be it material sacrifices or even, in extreme cases, a sacrifice of one’s own safety. 
Scientists are usually overly sensitive, and are just as easily excited as artists and poets.
The most perfect model of a cat is the same cat, or better yet, itself. (Philosophy of Science 1945)
“The feeling of an inextricable connection with the past... depends not only on knowledge of chronicle history... striving for a worthy future, one should remember the past, and if there are entire regions where awareness of the past is crumpled to the size of a barely noticeable point on a huge map, then nothing could be worse both for ourselves and for our descendants..." (Norbert Wiener. Science and Society. See in Social Sciences and Modernity - 1994, No. 6, p. 130.)
“The brain is a peculiar organ... in one Chicago insurance company there was an agent, a rising star... Unfortunately, he was often overcome by the blues, and when he left home from work, no one knew whether he would use the elevator or step outside the tenth floor window. In the end, the board convinced him to part with a tiny piece of the frontal lobe of the brain... After that... no agent since the founding of the society has accomplished equal feats in the field of insurance... However, everyone overlooked one fact: a lobotomy does not promote subtlety of judgment and caution. When the insurance agent became a financier, he failed completely, and so did society. No, I wouldn’t want anyone to change my internal wiring diagram...” (Norbert Wiener. Head. American Science Fiction: Collection: - M.: Raduga, 1988, p. 451.)
Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, into a Jewish family. At the age of nine, he entered a secondary school, where children aged 15-16 began to study, having previously completed eight years. He graduated from high school when he was eleven. He immediately entered the higher education institution Tufts College. After graduating, at the age of fourteen, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then he studied at Harvard and Cornell Universities, at the age of 17 he became a Master of Arts at Harvard, and at 18 he became a Doctor of Philosophy with a specialty in mathematical logic.
Harvard University awarded Wiener a scholarship to study at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities.
In the 1915/1916 academic year, Wiener taught mathematics at Harvard University as an assistant.
Wiener spent the next academic year employed at the University of Maine. After the United States entered the war, Wiener worked at the General Electric plant, from where he moved to the editorial office of the American Encyclopedia in Albany. In 1919, he became an assistant professor in the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In 1920-1925, he solved physical and technical problems using abstract mathematics and found new patterns in the theory of Brownian motion, potential theory, and harmonic analysis.
At the same time, Wiener met one of the designers of computers, V. Bush, and expressed the idea of a new harmonic analyzer that came to him one day. In 1926, D.Ya. came to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stroich. Wiener and he began applying the ideas of differential geometry to differential equations, including the Schrödinger equation.
In 1929, two large final articles by Wiener on generalized harmonic analysis were published in the Swedish journal Acta Mathematics and the American Annals of Mathematics. Since 1932, Wiener has been a professor at MIT.
The computers that existed at that time did not have the necessary speed. This forced Wiener to formulate a number of requirements for such machines. The machine, Wiener believed, must correct its actions itself; it must develop the ability to self-learn. To do this, it needs to be equipped with a memory block, where control signals would be stored, as well as the information that the machine will receive during operation.
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In 1943, an article by Wiener, Rosenbluth, and Baiglow “Behavior, Purposefulness and Teleology” was published, which is a sketch of the cybernetic method.
The idea of writing a book and telling in it about the generality of laws operating in the field of automatic regulation, organization of production and nervous system person. He managed to persuade the Parisian publisher Feyman to publish this future book.
Immediately a difficulty arose with the title; the content was too unusual. It was necessary to find a word related to management, regulation. The Greek word that came to mind was similar to “helmsman,” which in English sounds like “cybernetics.” So Wiener left him.
The book was published in 1948 by the New York publishing house John Wiley and Sons and the Parisian Hermann et Qi. Speaking about control and communication in living organisms and machines, he saw the main thing not just in the words “control” and “communication”, but in their combination. Cybernetics is the science of information management, and Wiener can rightfully be considered the creator of this science.
All the years after the release of Cybernetics, Wiener propagated its ideas. In 1950, a sequel was released - " Human use human beings", in 1958 - "Nonlinear problems in the theory of random processes", in 1961 - the second edition of "Cybernetics", in 1963 - a kind of cybernetic essay " Joint-Stock Company God and Golem."
ARTURO ROSENBLUTH,
TO MY FRIEND IN SCIENCE
FOR MANY YEARS.
Norbert Wiener and his Cybernetics
(from translation editor)
The history of the century is being made before our eyes. We look with amazement at the strange communities that have grown up in recent wastelands, and then we quickly get used to them, make ourselves at home in them and rush on to new hundred-story skyscrapers.
The history of cybernetics goes back 19 years, an official history that began with Norbert Wiener, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he published his famous book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. Of course, this story had its own prehistory, which later authors traced back to Plato himself, but they started talking about cybernetics everywhere only after Wiener’s sensation. Although at first it seemed only a sensation, cybernetics has now turned into a vast and influential branch of world science.
Norbert Wiener has already completed his earthly labors. He was one of the most brilliant and paradoxical minds of the capitalist West, deeply concerned about the contradictions of the atomic age, and pondering intensely about the fate of man in an era of unprecedented power of science and technology. "The Human Use of Human Beings" is the title of his second cybernetic book. He felt the collapse of the old liberal humanism, but, like Einstein and a number of other representatives of Western thought, did not find the path to new values. Hence his pessimism, dressed in the garb of stoicism; he dreaded the role of Cassandra.
He left behind a large scientific legacy, complex and contradictory, in many ways controversial, in many ways interesting and stimulating. This legacy requires a thoughtful, critical, philosophical approach, far from the extremes of denial and exaggeration that are so often heard. And in this legacy, the first place is occupied by “Cybernetics” - the book that proclaimed the birth of a new science.
This is Wiener's main book, the summation of his entire scientific activity. Wiener called it “an inventory of his scientific baggage.” It represents the most important material for characterizing a scientist and at the same time a monument to the early, romantic era of cybernetics, the “period of storm and stress.” But she hasn't lost her scientific significance and may turn out to be quite useful for an inquisitive researcher even in new conditions, when cybernetics, having won a place in the sun, is concerned with the rational organization of what it has won.
The first English edition of Cybernetics was published in the USA and France in 1948. The modest book in red binding, replete with clerical errors and misprints, soon became a scientific bestseller, one of the “books of the century.” In 1958, it was translated into Russian by the Soviet Radio publishing house. In 1961, the second edition of “Cybernetics” was published in the USA with a new author’s preface and new chapters that made up the second part of the book; its previous text, reprinted without changes, only with errors corrected, was made the first part. In 1963, the Soviet Radio publishing house published the book “New Chapters of Cybernetics,” containing a translation of the preface and the second part from the second edition. Nowadays, readers are offered a complete revised translation of the publication with the appendix of some additional articles and conversations by Wiener.
* * *Prof. Wiener made the task of his biographers much easier by writing two books of memoirs in his later years: one of them is dedicated to his childhood and years of study (“Former Prodigy”); the other - to a professional career and creativity (“I am a mathematician”).
Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, the son of a Jewish immigrant. His father, Leo Wiener (1862-1939), a native of Bialystok, then part of Russia, studied in Germany in his youth and then moved overseas to the United States. There, after various adventures, he eventually became a prominent philologist. In Columbia, he was already a professor of modern languages at the University of Missouri, and later was a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University, the oldest in the United States, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston. In the same American Cambridge in 1915, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the main higher technical schools in the country, settled subsequently the son also worked. Leo Wiener was a follower of Tolstoy and his translator into English. As a scientist, he showed very broad interests and did not retreat from risky hypotheses. These qualities were inherited by Norbert Wiener, who was, however, apparently more methodical and profound.
According to family tradition, the Wieners descend from the famous Jewish scientist and theologian Moses Maimonides of Cordoba (1135-1204), a physician at the court of Sultan Saladin of Egypt. Norbert Wiener spoke with pride about this legend, without, however, fully vouching for its authenticity. He especially admired the versatility of Maimonides.
The future founder of cybernetics was a “child prodigy” in childhood, a child with early awakened abilities. This was largely facilitated by his father, who worked with him according to his own program. Young Norbert read Darwin and Dante at seven years old, graduated from high school at eleven, and graduated from a higher educational institution, Tufts College, at fourteen. Here he received his first academic degree - Bachelor of Arts.
He then studied at Harvard University as a graduate student and at the age of seventeen became a Master of Arts, and at eighteen, in 1913, a Doctor of Philosophy specializing in mathematical logic. The title of Doctor of Philosophy in this case is not only a tribute to tradition, since Wiener first prepared himself for a philosophical career and only later gave preference to mathematics. At Harvard he studied philosophy under the guidance of J. Santayana and J. Royce (whose name the reader will find in Cybernetics). Wiener's philosophical education was later reflected in the development of the project for a new science and in the books that he wrote about it.
Harvard University provided the young doctor with a scholarship to travel to Europe. In 1913-1915 Wiener attended the University of Cambridge in England and the University of Göttingen in Germany, but due to the war he returned to America and ended his educational journey at Columbia University in New York. In Cambridge, England, Wiener studied with the famous B. Russell, who at the beginning of the century was a leading authority in the field of mathematical logic, and with J. H. Hardy, a famous mathematician and specialist in number theory. Subsequently Wiener wrote: “Russell gave me the very reasonable idea that a man who intended to specialize in mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics might also know something of mathematics itself.” In Gottingen, Wiener studied with the great German mathematician D. Hilbert and listened to lectures by the philosopher E. Husserl.
In 1915 the service began. Wiener received a position as an assistant in the philosophy department at Harvard, but only for a year. In search of happiness, he changed a number of jobs, was a journalist, and wanted to become a soldier. However, he, apparently, was sufficiently wealthy and did not feel the need. Finally, with the assistance of mathematician F.V. Osgood, a friend of his father, Wiener got a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1919, Wiener was appointed teacher (instructor) of the MIT Department of Mathematics and since then remained an employee of the institute throughout his life. In 1926, Wiener married Margarita Engeman, an American of German origin.
Wiener considered the years 1920-1925 to be his formative years in mathematics. He reveals a desire to solve complex physical and technical problems using the methods of modern abstract mathematics. He studies the theory of Brownian motion, tries his hand at potential theory, and develops generalized harmonic analysis for the needs of communication theory. His academic career proceeds slowly but successfully.
In 1932, Wiener became a full professor. He is gaining a name in scientific circles in America and Europe. Dissertations are written under his guidance. He publishes a number of books and large memoirs on mathematics: “Generalized harmonic analysis”, “Tauberian theorems”, “Fourier integral and some of its applications”, etc. A joint study with the German mathematician E. Hopf (or Hopf) on the radiative equilibrium of stars introduces science "Wiener-Hopf equation". Another joint work, the monograph “Fourier Transform in the Complex Domain,” was written in collaboration with the English mathematician R. Paley. This book was published under tragic circumstances: before its completion, an Englishman died in the Canadian Rockies during a ski trip. Wiener also pays tribute to technical creativity, in company with the Chinese scientist Yu.V. Lee and W. Bush, a famous designer of analog computers. In 1935-1936 Wiener was vice president of the American Mathematical Society.
mathematician, founder of cybernetics (USA). The most important works: “Behavior, Purposefulness and Teleology” (1947, co-authored with A. Rosenbluth and J. Bigelow); “Cybernetics, or control and communication in animals and machines” (1948, had a decisive influence on the development of world science); "Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society" (1950); "My attitude to cybernetics. Its past and future" (1958); "Joint Stock Company God and Golem" (1963, Russian translation "The Creator and the Robot"). Autobiographical books: "Former child prodigy. My childhood and youth" (1953) and "I am a mathematician" (1956). Novel "The Tempter" (1963). National Medal of Science for distinguished service in mathematics, engineering, and the biological sciences (the highest honor for U.S. scientists, 1963). V. was born into the family of an immigrant Leo V., a Jewish native of Bialystok (Russia), who abandoned traditional Judaism, a follower of the teachings and translator of the works of L. Tolstoy in English language , Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Missouri, Professor of Slavic Languages at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). According to the oral tradition of the V. family, their family went back to the Jewish scientist and theologian Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), physician to Sultan Salah ad-din of Egypt. V.'s early education was supervised by his father according to his own program. At the age of 7, V. read Darwin and Dante, at 11 he graduated from high school; He received his higher mathematical education and his first bachelor of arts degree at Tufte College (1908). Then V. studied at graduate school at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy with J. Santayana and Royce, Master of Arts (1912). Doctor of Philosophy (in mathematical logic) from Harvard University (1913). In 1913-1915, with the support of Harvard University, he continued his education at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities. At Cambridge University, V. studied number theory with J.H. Hardy and mathematical logic with Russell, who “...instilled in me the very reasonable idea that a person who was going to specialize in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics might know something and from mathematics itself..." (V.). At the University of Göttingen, V. was a student of a philosophy course with Husserl and a mathematics course with Hilbert. In connection with the First World War, he returned to the USA (1915), where he completed his education at Columbia University (New York), after which he became an assistant in the philosophy department at Harvard University. Teacher of mathematics and mathematical logic at a number of US universities (1915-1917). Journalist (1917-1919). Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1919 until his death; full professor of mathematics at MIT since 1932. V. conducted his early work in the field of foundations of mathematics. The works of the late 1920s relate to the field of theoretical physics: the theory of relativity and quantum theory. V. achieved his greatest results as a mathematician in probability theory (stationary random processes) and analysis (potential theory, harmonic and almost periodic functions, Tauberian theorems, series and Fourier transforms). In the field of probability theory, V. almost completely studied an important class of stationary random processes (later named after him), and built (independently from the works of A.N. Kolmogorov) by the 1940s the theories of interpolation, extrapolation, filtering of stationary random processes, and Brownian motion. In 1942, V. approached the general statistical theory of information: the results were published in the monograph “Interpolation, extrapolation and smoothing of stationary time series” (1949), later published under the title “Time Series”. Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society in 1935-1936. He maintained intensive personal contacts with world-famous scientists J. Hadamard, M. Fréchet, J. Bernal, N. Bohr, M. Born, J. Haldane and others. As a visiting professor, V. lectured at Tsinghua University (Beijing, 1936- 1937). V. considered his time working in China to be an important stage, the beginning of the maturity of a world-class scientist: “My labors began to bear fruit - I managed not only to publish a number of significant independent works, but also to develop a certain concept that could no longer be ignored in science.” The development of this concept led directly to the creation of cybernetics. Back in the early 1930s, V. became close to A. Rosenbluth, a member of the laboratory of physiology of W. B. Cannon from Harvard Medical School, the organizer of a methodological seminar that brought together representatives of various sciences. This made it easier for V. to become acquainted with the problems of biology and medicine, and strengthened him in the idea of the need for a broad synthetic approach to contemporary science. The use of the latest technical means during the Second World War confronted the warring parties with the need to solve serious technical problems (mainly in the field of air defense, communications, cryptology, etc.). The main attention was paid to solving problems of automatic control, automatic communication, electrical networks and computer technology. V., as an outstanding mathematician, was involved in work in this area, which resulted in the beginning of the study of deep analogies between the processes occurring in living organisms and in electronic (electrical) systems, an impetus for the emergence of cybernetics. In 1945-1947, V. wrote the book “Cybernetics”, working at the National Cardiological Institute of Mexico (Mexico City) with A. Rosenbluth, co-author of cybernetics - the science of managing, receiving, transmitting and transforming information in systems of any nature (technical, biological, social, economic, administrative, etc.). V., who in his research was close to the traditions of the old schools of scientific universalism G. Leibniz and J. Buffon, paid serious attention to the problems of methodology and philosophy of science, striving for the broadest synthesis of individual scientific disciplines. Mathematics (his basic specialization) for V. was unified and closely connected with natural science, and therefore he opposed its sharp division into pure and applied, since: “... the highest purpose of mathematics is precisely to find hidden order in the chaos that surrounds us. ..Nature, in the broad sense of the word, can and should serve not only as a source of problems solved in my research, but also to suggest an apparatus suitable for solving them..." (“I am a mathematician”). His philosophical views V. outlined in the books “The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society" and "Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine." Philosophically, V. was very close to the ideas of the Copenhagen School physicists M. Born and N. Bohr, who declared independence from "professional metaphysicians" in their special "realistic "a worldview beyond idealism and materialism. Considering that "... the dominance of matter characterizes a certain stage of physics of the 19th century to a much greater extent than modernity. Now “materialism” is just something like a loose synonym for “mechanism”. Essentially, the entire dispute between mechanists and vitalists can be put aside in the archive of poorly formulated questions..." ("Cybernetics"), V. at the same time writes that idealism "...dissolves all things in the mind..." ( “Former child prodigy”). V. also experienced a significant influence of positivism. Based on the ideas of the Copenhagen School, V. tried to connect cybernetics with statistical mechanics in the stochastic (probabilistic) concept of the Universe. At the same time, according to V. himself, his rapprochement with existentialism influenced by his pessimistic interpretation of the concept of "randomness". In the book ("I am a mathematician") V. writes: "... We are swimming upstream, fighting a huge stream of disorganization, which, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, tends to reduce everything to thermal death - universal balance and sameness. What Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs called heat death in their physics work found its counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who argued that we live in a world of chaotic morality. In this world, our first duty is to create arbitrary islands of order and system...” (V.’s desire to compare the teachings of Bergson and Freud with the methods of statistical physics is known). However, heat death is still thought of by V. here as a limiting state , achievable only in eternity, therefore, in the future, fluctuations of ordering are probable: “...In a world where entropy as a whole tends to increase, there are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy, and the presence of these islands makes it possible for some of us to prove the existence of progress. .." ("Cybernetics and Society"). The mechanism of the emergence of areas of entropy reduction." ..consists in the natural selection of stable forms...here physics directly turns into cybernetics..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). According to V., "... ultimately striving for the most probable, the stochastic Universe does not know the only predetermined path, and this allows order to fight chaos for a time... Man influences the course of events in his favor, extinguishing the entropy extracted from environment negative entropy - information... Knowledge is part of life, moreover, its very essence. To live effectively means to live with the correct information..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). With all this, the gains of knowledge are still temporary. V. never "... imagined logic, knowledge and all mental activity as a complete closed picture; I could understand these phenomena as the process by which a person organizes his life in such a way that it proceeds in accordance with the external environment. The battle for knowledge is important, not victory. Behind every victory, i.e. everything that reaches its climax is immediately followed by the twilight of the gods, in which the very concept of victory dissolves at the very moment when
it will be achieved..." (“I am a mathematician”). V. called W. J. Gibbs (USA) the founder of stochastic natural science, considering himself a continuator of his direction. In general, V.’s views can be interpreted as casualistic with the influence of relativism and agnosticism. According to V., the limitations of human capabilities for cognition of the stochastic Universe are due to the stochastic nature of the connections between man and his environment, since in “... the probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and judgments relating to a certain real Universe as a whole , and instead we pose questions, the answers to which can be found in the assumption of a huge number of similar worlds..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). As for probabilities, their very existence for V. is nothing more than a hypothesis, due to the fact that “...no amount of purely objective and individual observation can show that probability is a valid idea. In other words, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established using induction. Inductive logic, Baconian logic, is something we can act upon rather than something we can prove...” (“Cybernetics and Society”). V.’s social ideals were as follows: in favor of society, based on “...human values, different from buying and selling...”, for “... healthy democracy and brotherhood of peoples...”, V. pinned his hopes on “... the level of public consciousness...” , on "...the germination of seeds of good...", oscillated between a negative attitude towards the contemporary society of capitalism and an orientation towards "... the social responsibility of business circles..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). Roman V. " The Tempter" is a variant reading of the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, in which the hero of the novel, a talented scientist, becomes a victim of the self-interest of businessmen. In religious matters, V. considered himself "... a skeptic, standing outside of religion..." ("Former Prodigy") In the book “The Creator and the Robot,” V., drawing an analogy between God and a cyberneticist, treats God as an ultimate concept (such as infinity in mathematics). V., considering the culture of the West to be morally and intellectually weakening, pinned his hopes on the culture of the East. V. wrote that “... the superiority of European culture over the great culture of the East is only a temporary episode in the history of mankind...”. V. even proposed to J. Nehru a plan for the development of Indian industry through cybernetic automatic factories in order to avoid, as he wrote, ". ..devastating proletarianization..." (“I am a mathematician”). (See Cybernetics.)
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Anatoly Ushakov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Prof. department control systems and computer science, ITMO University - [email protected]
Historical experience in the development of scientific thought shows that if its bearer is deeply engaged in scientific work, then over time he becomes a natural systems analyst, which usually leads to breakthrough scientific results. One example of this in the 20th century. Cybernetics, or the science of control and communication in machines and living organisms, appeared as the basis of materialistic cybernetic philosophy, created by an American scientist with Russian roots, Norbert Wiener.
Rice. 1. Norbert Wiener at the blackboard
According to biographers, Norbert Wiener (Fig. 1) is a classic example of a child prodigy. He was born in Columbia (Missouri, USA) on November 26, 1894. His parents emigrated to the USA at the end of the 19th century. My father was a native of the city of Bialystok, Grodno province of the Russian Empire, who later became a professor and head of the department of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard University, the oldest in the United States.
Rice. 2. Norbert Wiener in his youth
The boy grew up in a large family, where his father deliberately prepared him for a scientific career. As a result, Norbert entered high school at the age of nine, and graduated from college at the age of 14, then continued his education at Harvard and Cornell universities and became a PhD in mathematical logic. He independently masters five foreign languages, including Chinese, and is immersed in mental activity, moving away from his peers, which is aggravated by acute myopia and natural clumsiness (Fig. 2). Therefore, he was perceived by his fellow students as an unbalanced prodigy, which over the years did not prevent him from becoming a friendly and warm person.
Rice. 3. Wiener in the MIT auditorium with a model of a tricycle
Norbert continued his education at the best European universities of Cambridge and Göttingen, attending lectures and seminars by Bertrand Russell, Godfrey Hardy, Edmund Landau and David Hilbert. With the outbreak of World War I, he returned to the United States, worked at several universities, in newspaper editorial offices and even at a military plant, and was enlisted in the army, from where he was soon discharged due to myopia. He did not stop studying science and, finally, in 1919 he was accepted as an assistant in the mathematics department (where he later became a professor) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with which his entire subsequent life was connected (Fig. 3). In his book “I Am a Mathematician,” Wiener wrote that he owes “...MIT the opportunity to work and think about everything that interests me.”
Wiener's main works in the twenties were related to statistical mechanics, vector spaces (Banach-Wiener spaces), differential geometry, the problem of the distribution of prime numbers, potential theory, harmonic analysis with applications to problems in electrical engineering and quantum theory. At the same time, Norbert Wiener defined the so-called Wiener process. Somewhat later, he began collaborating with one of the designers of analog computers, Vannevar Bush, which later helped him a lot in his work on digital machines. Wiener proposed the idea of a new harmonic analyzer, which Bush subsequently put into practice.
Rice. 4. Wiener and his wife in India (1955)
In 1926, Wiener married Margaret Engemann from a German family, and they went on a honeymoon around Europe, where Wiener met many prominent European mathematicians. Norbert Wiener was convinced that mental work “wears a person to the limit,” and therefore should alternate with physical rest. He always took advantage of every opportunity to go for walks, swam, played various games, enjoyed communicating with non-mathematicians, and studied with his two children (Fig. 4).
With the onset of the Great Depression in the United States, Wiener did not stop his scientific work, raising students, among whom the most famous were the Chinese Yuk-Wing Lee and the Japanese Shikao Ikehara, with whom he subsequently worked closely (Fig. 5 ).
Rice. 5. Wiener with his student Yu. V. Li (left) and colleague at MTIS A. G. Bose
Thanks to the support of G. Hardy and the prominent mathematician Yakov Davidovich Tamarkin, who emigrated from the USSR, Wiener’s works became well known in America. He was elected vice president of the American Mathematical Society. In the pre-war years, joint work with the German mathematician Eberhard Hopf (Wiener-Hopf equations), important for forecasting problems, turned out to be particularly significant; articles on general harmonic analysis; participation in the seminar of physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, who played an important role in the formation of Norbert Wiener’s ideas of cybernetics, lecturing at Beijing Tsinghua University.
During World War II, Norbert Wiener works at the MIT radiation laboratory, where the first anti-aircraft radar systems were created. He studies the problem of aircraft movement during anti-aircraft fire and is developing problems of automatic fire control of anti-aircraft artillery taking into account prediction, which convinced Wiener of the important role of feedback (which also plays a significant role in human body), as well as the need to design a control computer. In his opinion, such machines “should consist of vacuum tubes and not of gears or electromechanical relays. This is necessary to ensure fast enough action.” In addition, they "should use the more economical binary rather than decimal number system." The machine, Norbert Wiener believed, must be endowed with a certain independence to correct its actions and self-learn; it must become “thinking.”
The idea of writing a book and telling in it about the generality of laws operating in the field of automatic regulation, production organization and in the human nervous system had long been ripening in Wiener’s head. The first sketch of the cybernetic method was an article in 1943, and from 1946 he began to work closely on the book. Immediately a difficulty arose with the title; the content was too unusual. It was necessary to find a word related to management, regulation. The Greek word that came to mind was similar to the “helmsman” of a ship, which in English sounds like “cybernetics.” So Norbert Wiener left him.
Wiener's famous book was published in 1948 by a New York and then a French publishing house. At this time, he already suffered from cataracts, clouding of the lens of the eye, and had difficulty seeing. Hence the numerous errors and typos in the text of the publication. With the publication of this book, Norbert Wiener, as they say, “woke up famous.” The book was immediately translated into many languages, which contributed to the development of intensive research on the problems formulated in this work.
The book was published in Russian in the USSR only in 1958 and was received rather ambiguously. Thus, in the book, Professor M.A. Bykhovsky recalls that in 1952, one of the major Soviet scientists in the field of communications wrote: “Wiener and others, based on an external, superficial analogy and speculating on the vagueness and ambiguity of some terms and concepts, are trying to transfer the laws of radio communication to biological and psychological phenomena, they talk about the “throughput” of the human brain, etc. Naturally, all these attempts to give cybernetics a scientific character with the help of terms and concepts borrowed from other fields do not at all make cybernetics a science, it remains a false theory, created by scientific reactionaries and philosophizing ignoramuses, in captivity of idealism and metaphysics...”
In turn, at the same time, one of the Soviet authors, who wrote the thickest books on the theory of automatic control, wrote in the preface to his next work: “The attempt of bourgeois scientists to identify man and machine can cause nothing but indignation in the hearts of Soviet people.” . Nevertheless, the bulk of real Soviet scientists understood everything and continued to conduct scientific work, waiting for better times. They came after the launch of the first Soviet satellite in 1957 and the subsequent publication of the Russian version of Norbert Wiener’s book. The word “cybernetics” was heard in the institute classrooms; the disciplines “Fundamentals of Cybernetics”, “Technical Cybernetics”, etc. appeared in the curricula for training engineers in specialties related to automation and telemechanics. Faculties and departments with “cybernetic” names were organized, The USSR Academy of Sciences began to publish the “Cybernetic Collection”, a Council on Cybernetics was organized under its presidium, and public discussions “Can a machine think?” were held on television.
Rice. 6. Wiener with A. A. Lyapunov (left) and G. M. Frank in Moscow (1960)
Moreover, the contribution of Soviet scientists A. N. Kolmogorov, V. A. Kotelnikov, V. I. Siforov, R. L. Stratonovich, A. Ya. Khinchin to the development of the theory of communication and stochastic processes, as well as A. A. Andronov , V. S. Kulebakin, A. A. Krasovsky, N. N. Krasovsky, A. M. Letov, A. I. Lurie, M. V. Meerova, B. N. Petrova, E. P. Popova, A A. Pervozvansky, L. S. Pontryagin, A. A. Feldbaum, Ya. Z. Tsypkin, V. A. Yakubovich in the development of control theory was noticed by the world scientific community involved in the problems of cybernetics. The first congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) was held in Moscow in 1960, and its president at that time was A. M. Letov. Norbert Wiener was also invited to this congress, who was greeted with interest by prominent Soviet scientists and public figures. He was invited to give lectures and reports, published articles, and noted his achievements (Fig. 6).
Looking back at that already distant post-war period, one involuntarily asks the question, what factors then determined the appearance of this “revolutionary book”?
The first factor was time. The bloody Second World War ended. Its participants healed the wounds inflicted. Scientific thought entered a peaceful creative channel. World scientists involved in the theory and practice of control and communications were ready for a breakthrough step.
The second factor was the emergence in the scientific community of an individual who had unique knowledge, extraordinary performance, breadth of scientific views and interests, experience in applying his knowledge in such areas as the theory of stochastic processes, forecasting theory, spectral analysis, communication theory, theory of computer systems, theory and practice of artillery fire control at moving targets, neurophysiology. Norbert Wiener was such an individual.
The third factor was the state of development of the theory and practice of automatic control achieved by that time. The founders of modern control theory were considered by world scientists and Norbert Wiener himself to be the English physicist, creator of classical electrodynamics D. C. Maxwell, Russian scientists I. A. Vyshnegradsky and A. M. Lyapunov, heat engineer A. B. Stodola, mathematicians E. E. J. Routh and A. Hurwitz, electrical circuit specialists H. W. Bode and H. T. Nyqvist. A powerful contribution to the tools of control theory was the book of American engineers H. M. James, N. B. Nichols and R. S. Phillips.
The fourth factor was the state of development of stochastic communication theory, information theory and information transmission theory that had been achieved by that time. Here, a major contribution belongs to Norbert Wiener himself and Claude Shannon, who published a fundamental work on information theory and its transmission in 1948.
The fifth factor was the fairly successful solution by that time to the problem of optimal linear filtering and stochastic forecasting, solved independently by A. N. Kolmogorov and Norbert Wiener. Speaking about this systemic factor, we should touch upon the ethical side of the scientific process, which positively characterizes the creator of cybernetics. In his book, Wiener admitted: “When I wrote my first paper on forecasting theory, I did not realize that some of the main mathematical ideas of this paper had already been published before me.<…>Kolmogorov not only independently examined all the main issues in this area, but was also the first to publish his results.”
The main merit of Norbert Wiener, as the author of the famous book, is that he linked information and the management process into a single meaningful module. There cannot be high-quality management results when low-quality information is used in its organization; everyone who has the fate of managing machines, living organisms or social structures should remember this.
Every talented person is usually talented in many ways. This also applies to Norbert Wiener. In addition to scientific works, he also authored works of art. The list of his fiction includes about a dozen works, and all of them have a good cybernetic subtext; they require a lot of attention from the reader when reading.
In 1964, Norbert Wiener was awarded the highest government award for US scientists, the US National Medal of Science. The then US President Lyndon Johnson, presenting the award, said: “Your contribution to science is surprisingly universal, your view has always been absolutely original, you are a stunning embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist.” However, Norbert Wiener blew his nose loudly and did not hear what the president said to him. That same year, on March 18, Norbert Wiener died, just short of his seventieth birthday.
The name of Norbert Wiener will always be remembered in the scientific community, but he will also be remembered by ordinary citizens with the word “cybernetics”, because whenever it is necessary to strengthen the characteristics of any new man-made development, its authors will strive to attribute to it a piece of “cyber”.
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Literature
- Wiener N. I am a mathematician. M.: Science.
- Rosenbluelh A., Wiener N., Bigelow J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology //Philosophy of Science. Baltimore, 1943, vol. 10, No. 1.
- Wiener N. Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie & Camb. Mass.: MIT Press. 1948.
- Wiener N. Cybernetics, or control and communication in animals and machines. M.: Soviet radio. 1958.
- Bykhovsky M. A. Pioneers of the information age. History of communication development. M.: Technosphere. 2006.
- Theory of Servomechanisms /ed. H. M. James, N. B. Nichols, R. S. Phillips. New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill. 1947.
- Shannon C. E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication // Bell System Technical Journal. 1948. vol. 27.