American scientist, outstanding mathematician and philosopher, founder of cybernetics and the theory of artificial intelligence
short biography
Norbert Wiener(eng. Norbert Wiener; November 26, 1894, Columbia, Missouri, USA - March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) - American scientist, outstanding mathematician and philosopher, founder of cybernetics and the theory of artificial intelligence.
Norbert Wiener was born into a Jewish family. He was the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn. The scientist’s father, Leo Wiener (1862-1939), a descendant of Maimonides, was born in the city of Bialystok in the Russian Empire, studied at the Minsk and then Warsaw gymnasium, entered the Berlin Institute of Technology, after completing his second year he moved to the USA, where he eventually became a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. The parents of the mother, Bertha Kahn, came from Germany.
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 studied in high school. But at the age of 11, he entered the prestigious Tufts College, from which he graduated with honors just three years later, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree.
At age 18, Norbert Wiener received Ph.D. degrees in mathematical logic from 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 B. Russell and G. Hardy in Cambridge and D. Hilbert 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.
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 1920-1930 he again visited Europe. The Wiener-Hopf equation appears in the theory of radiative equilibrium of stars. He lectures at Beijing Tsinghua University. Among his acquaintances are N. Bohr, M. Born, J. Hadamard and other famous scientists.
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, according to general 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 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 US National Medal of Science, the highest honor for a man of science in America. At a ceremonial meeting dedicated to this event, President Johnson said: “Your contribution to science is amazingly universal, your view has always been completely original, you are a stunning embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist.”
Norbert Wiener died on March 18, 1964 in Stockholm. Buried in Vittum Hill Cemetery, New Hampshire.
Awards
He received six scientific awards and honorary Ph.D. degrees from three universities.
Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship (1926-27), Bocher Prize (1933), Gibbs Lecture (1949), US National Medal of Science (1963), National Book Award (1965)
Postage stamp of Moldova, 2000
Memory
A crater on the far side of the Moon was named in honor of Norbert Wiener in 1970.
N. Wiener on the social consequences of automation
Let's imagine that the second revolution is completed. Then the average person with average or even less ability will not be able to offer anything for sale that would be worth paying money for. There is only one way out - to build a society based on human values other than buying and selling. To build such a society, a lot of preparation and a lot of struggle will be required, which, under favorable circumstances, can be waged on an ideological plane, but otherwise, who knows how?Categories: Tags:
Nowadays, the words “Internet” or “computer” no longer surprise anyone. However, the emergence of smart machines, which with great speed can calculate a large mathematical example or come into contact with any point on the planet, is closely related to the science of cybernetics. And for any knowledgeable person, “Norbert Wiener”, “cybernetics” are two interrelated words. It is this man that society rightfully calls the “father” of this science.
short biography
Many scholarly biographers, when asked: “Who is Norbert Wiener?”, will answer without hesitation that he is the most striking example of a child prodigy. The future father of cybernetics in America was born in the town of Columbia, Missouri, in 1894. His father was a native of the Russian Empire. He was a very educated and well-read man. He taught literature and history of Slavic languages. A little later he received the position of head of the department.
From early childhood, his father prepared the boy for a career as a scientist. Perhaps Norbert Wiener began his scientific journey at the age of three. A short biography in most publications begins at this age. At that time, the boy already knew how to read, write, and even helped his father translate the works of L.N. Tolstoy. At the age of eight, he already skillfully reads the works of Dante and the works of Darwin. He will write his first scientific work at the age when others of his age are just beginning to study the outline of sticks and hooks.
Without really attending classes at a regular high school (some sources claim that he ignored it altogether), the boy enters a prestigious college, which he graduates with honors ahead of schedule. At eighteen, he defended his dissertation at Harvard, and a few years later became a professor at several higher educational institutions.
In his autobiography, to the question: “Who is Norbert Wiener?” the scientist replies that he is a mathematician. From an early age, he was better at mathematics, although he also did not lose sight of the humanitarian aspects of education.
Job
It seems to many that a scientist is always a quiet professor with round glasses, sitting in his office and working on some project. Who is Norbert Wiener, who was he? This man was significantly different from the “standard” scientist with an office. In his life, the short-sighted and slightly clumsy scientist managed to work at a construction site, at a military factory, and at a newspaper. I really wanted to join the army, but was expelled from there due to vision problems.
He dedicated most of his life to education, both his own and that of others. He works simultaneously in more than ten universities, in various departments. Teaches mathematics, logic, natural science, literature, social sciences. At the same time, he independently studies foreign languages, even mastering Chinese and Japanese.
Theorist
Who is Norbert Wiener: a practitioner or a theoretical scientist? He himself called himself a theorist; he preferred to think more and create scientific theories, proving them with facts. Together with Claude Shannon, he develops the modern theory of computer science.
Surely everyone is familiar with the concept of “bit”. So it was this person who once came up with it to make it easier to describe a digital code. The scientist devoted a lot of work to computer technology, probability theory and electromagnetic networks.
Cybernetics
But it is not the idea of creating a computer that this man is known throughout the world for. What Norbert Wiener is famous for is that he invented the concept of cybernetics. It was he who began to develop science, the postulates of which make it possible to create artificial intelligence. The scientist presented cybernetics as an opportunity to transform the skills of animals, creating “training programs” for technology.
Wiener himself coined this word, borrowing it from the works of ancient Greek scientists. In those days it meant “controlling a ship,” but Wiener transformed cybernetics into “controlling smart machines.” He compared a person to a machine, to a clock mechanism that processes energy.
A book called "Cybernetics" was published in 1948 in America. At that time, the scientist was already fifty-four years old. However, work, as many say, is not understandable to everyone. To read this book and understand what it says, you need to have a fairly deep knowledge of mathematics, philosophy, technology and neurophysiology.
Man "in himself"
Surely any actor who has to play the role of an enthusiastic and enthusiastic scientist could borrow the image of Wiener. A typical nerd, with glasses and a pointed beard, awkward and clumsy, absent-minded in communicating with others and completely absorbed in his inner world and theories.
Eyewitnesses recalled that Wiener, often immersed in his thoughts, even forgot where he was going and what he wanted to do. One day, having encountered him on the alley, the student talked with the teacher, and then was puzzled by his question: “Do you remember where I was going: from the dining room or to it?”
Norbert Wiener (born Norbert Wiener; November 26, 1894, Columbia, Missouri, USA - March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) was an 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.
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.
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.
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.
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Norbert Wiener is the father of cybernetics, without which it is now impossible to imagine our life and everything that happens in it.
Like his future “creations,” Norbert himself was “programmed” for a certain fate from childhood. The dictates of his father, under whose authority the future scientist had the opportunity to develop as an individual, were tangible literally from the first conscious steps of Wiener’s life. Norbert’s father himself was a very remarkable person, and although there is an opinion that “nature rests on the children of geniuses,” in this case everything turned out exactly the opposite - everything that was genetically laid down, Wiener managed to develop and increase, subsequently rising to the level iconic personalities who have made an invaluable contribution to the development of scientific thought, the consequences of which we feel at every step, and in the long term, humanity has yet to appreciate the foundation that was laid by people like Norbert Wiener in the pyramid of knowledge development of human civilization.
Norbert Wiener was born in November 1894 in Missouri, where the Wiener family moved from the Polish city of Bialystok, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, in addition to the fact that by the time his son was born he was already a fairly well-known philologist, is also famous for having translated the twenty-four-volume collected works of Leo Tolstoy from Russian into English. This is what Norbert himself wrote about his father: “He became a scientist more due to his character traits than due to any special training.” . Of course, books occupied a dominant position in the Wiener family, and little Norbert could not get away from this, and, apparently, he did not resist much. The future “father of cybernetics” began to read a little later than he could walk, and from that moment on he felt the demands of his father, who placed considerable hopes on his heir. Norbert himself, without coercion, did what he liked, for example, by the age of 7 he realized the theory of Darwinism, while his father had a hand in his son’s study of languages and mathematics. Norbert was literally a “child prodigy,” and subsequently, without false modesty, he called himself that. And there was a lot of evidence of this - at the age of 11, Wiener completed a college course, at 14 he received a bachelor’s degree, at 17 he became a Master of Arts, and at 18 he received a Doctor of Philosophy. Impressive, isn't it? However, this was only the beginning of a long journey.
When talking about successful people, we sometimes wonder why they, these same “successful” people, become so? And how are they different from the rest? Speaking about our hero, it is worth noting that he had a full set of qualities that characterize a typical scientist, familiar to us from old Soviet films. Today's youth call these people “nerds.” Typical appearance - a beard and glasses, unconventional and sometimes strange judgments, and, most importantly, the presence of a constant special opinion. There were stories about Wiener's forgetfulness that gradually became jokes. Here is one of them:
One day his family moved to live on another street. His wife, knowing Wiener’s forgetfulness, always wrote him notes with the address where they lived. Wiener lost the note, somehow remembered the way, and came to his old place of residence. There was a girl playing there, from whom he asked about his family, to which the girl answered him in a human voice: “Mom knew that you would lose the note with the new address!”
However, from humor let’s return to the prose of life. The lively, cognitive mind of the young scientist, like a sponge, absorbed everything new, and, taking into account a wide range of interests, accumulated data from which a unique generator of ideas was formed, which over time surprised many. There was a period in Wiener’s life during which he, as he later put it, “tasted the joy of free labor.” During the seven years following his doctorate, Norbert studied various sciences at various universities around the world, including Cambridge and Göttingen. In addition, he tried to engage in purely “worldly” matters, for example, journalism, and even tried to go to the front (the First World War was going on), but due to poor eyesight he was discharged, and, perhaps, thanks to this physical defect, fate saved the scientist and all his subsequent discoveries are from non-existence. The accumulated life experience coupled with a non-standard approach gave excellent results. His research in the field of mathematics was periodically published in world scientific publications. At the same time, Wiener was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what one of his students recalled about his lectures:
He would go up to the blackboard, write something on it with chalk, and then, muttering dissatisfiedly under his breath: “Wrong, wrong,” he erased it. Then he wrote and erased again and again. Two hours later he said: “Now, perhaps, that’s it!” and, without looking at the audience, ran out of the audience.
Speaking about the phenomenon of Norbert Wiener, it should be noted that in his works he tried to compare what seemed absolutely illogical at the then level of development of science. Thus, he linked together the principle of machine calculation and the peculiarities of the human brain, while rightly assuming that the human brain is a more advanced tool, which, among other things, has something that is inaccessible to machines to this day. It's about motivation. 
Actually, Wiener’s own motivation helped him take the first step towards the most important discovery of his life. Not getting to the front in the First World War, Wiener expressed a desire to be useful during the Second World War, but not on the front line, but in a research laboratory, where he was substantively involved in modeling the trajectories of enemy aircraft, which was based on observations of the behavior of aircraft and further systematization of the collected information. Even then, Wiener noticed that the modeling results have a certain pattern and lend themselves to a certain logic, which, as previously believed, was inherent only to intelligent beings. Here is what Wiener himself wrote about this in his “Cybernetics”:
“Already before the war, it became clear that the increasing speed of aircraft overturned the classical methods of fire control and that it was necessary to integrate into the fire control device all the computing devices that provide calculations for the shot... It is necessary to shoot not directly at the target, but at a certain point at which, according to calculations , after some time the plane and the projectile must meet. Therefore, we must find some method of predicting the future position of the aircraft."
Of course, it was extremely premature to talk about artificial intelligence, but the analogies already seemed obvious to Wiener. Based on them, he was able to convince a group of scientists at Princeton University, including neurophysiologists, that nervous system human being is analogous to a computer. At the same time, a language familiar to today’s programmers was developed - the so-called “binary number system”, in which both tube computers of the 40-50s of the last century and current high-performance processors of personal and desktop computers worked. The key idea of the new concept was the assumption that not only people can transmit and receive information, therefore the line between the human mind and artificial intelligence is not insurmountable.
Over time, all this was put together by Wiener; however, chance played a significant role in the publication of what later became the epoch-making Cybernetics. The scientist was persuaded to write it by a publisher during Wiener’s stay in Paris in 1946. This idea was realized two years later, and neither the publisher nor Wiener himself expected how popular the book would become for many years. The success was obvious. We can say that Wiener fulfilled a kind of “order” of that time. The masses were captured new idea– creation of smart machines that can solve all the problems of humanity. Even in the Soviet Union, which for the time being was wary of everything new coming from the West, in 1958, during the Khrushchev Thaw, a translation of “Cybernetics” was published, and Norbert Wiener himself even visited Moscow, where he talked with advanced figures of Soviet science, met with the editors of the journal “Questions of Philosophy”, and also read a report at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum.
However, the genius of our hero lay not only in the ability to think creatively and put forward fresh ideas, but also in the ability to critically evaluate what was already proposed, and, thinking ahead, to see not only the “bright” but also the “dark” sides of his theory. Already at the end of his life, he realized that with all the advantages of the idea of "smart machines", there are certain dangers. It will be clearer for us living today if we recall Hollywood films about cyborgs; at the same time, the term “rebellion of machines” came into use, later developed by science fiction writers. Norbert Wiener's last book was published a year before the scientist's death, in 1963, and was called " Joint-Stock Company“God and Golem” (Golem is a revived clay idol from the long-standing tradition of Prague Jews). In this, a kind of “scientific testament,” the creator of cybernetics warned humanity against the temptation to shift all social and economic issues onto the shoulders of undoubtedly smart, but without moral principles and motivation, artificially created devices. “What should we do if we hand over the solution of the most important questions to the hands of an inexorable sorcerer or, if you like, an inexorable cybernetic machine, to which we must ask questions correctly and, so to speak, in advance, without yet fully understanding the essence of the process that produces answers ?.. No, the future leaves little hope for those who expect our new mechanical slaves to create for us a world in which we will be freed from the need to think. They can help us, but on condition that our honor and reason meet the requirements of the highest morality..."“, wrote an outstanding scientist in his last book, many years ahead of the time in which he himself lived.
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 contribution to science is amazingly universal, your view has always been completely original, you are a stunning embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist.”
At these words, Wiener took out a handkerchief and blew his nose thoughtfully.
Such was the great scientist who, with his discoveries, entered the history of the development of science and technology, as well as into our everyday life. Back in those years when cybernetics was more a theory than a tool, he suggested that machines could not only be a means of modeling, but also serve as a communication tool. After all, everything that we use every day - computers, the Internet, electronic payment systems, data processing systems on stock exchanges, all this would be impossible without programmable machines and the calculation system proposed at one time Norbert Wiener, the man whose research became the basis for much of modern information technology. Which to this day, thanks to the automation of exchange operations, make life much easier for traders and investors around the world.
The followers of the great scientist keep up with the times, developing more and more complex automatic decision-making systems, training programs, trading robots, all kinds of indicators and much, much more. And now it is already thought that the hour is not far when intelligent systems will be able to compare with the human brain. And the great genius’s warning about the lack of emotionality in machines will fade into oblivion.
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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. " Human use 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.