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Times obituary
MEN, MACHINES AND MATHEMATICS
Professor Norbert Wiener, the distinguished mathematician and expositor of the science of cybernetics, has died in Stockholm, as briefly reported by Reuter in later editions of The Times yesterday.
He was Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1932 to 1959 and at the time of his death was Emeritus Professor.
The son of Leo Wiener, sometime Professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, he was born on November 26, 1894, and educated at Ayer High School, Massachusetts, Tufts College, and at Harvard and Cornell Universities. Subsequently, he studied with Bertrand Russell and Hardy at Cambridge and at Göttingen with Hilbert and began his long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1919 when he was appointed instructor of mathematics He was honoured by academic and scientific bodies all over the world.
His books included The Fourier Integral and certain of its applications (1933); Cybernetics (1948) second enlarged edition 1961; Extrapolation and Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949); The Human Use of Human Beings (1950); Ex-prodigy (1953) and I am a Mathematician (1956): two essays in autobiography; Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958); and The Templar (1959).
Professor D. G. Kendall writes:
By the death of Norbert Wiener, the world has lost one of its most original, versatile, and influential mathematicians, who captured the imagination of his contemporaries to an extent unusual in one of his professions. In 1951, when he was perhaps at the height of his fame, the writer remembers seeing a hoarding on an Illinois highway carrying the inscription "The switch is to the Courier" accompanied by an unidentified but unmistakable portrait of Wiener (this was well before the days of top people advertisements). The legend goes back a long way for Wiener was that rare phenomenon—an infant prodigy who made good and, indeed, remained precocious to the end of his life. In his autobiographical work, I Am a Mathematician, Wiener left a fascinating record, not only of his personal progress, but of the very many celebrated mathematicians with whom he worked. It provides a portrait of an epoch, if a highly individual one Wiener had many links with this country, and English mathematicians remember with pride the dedication of his celebrated book with Paley, "To G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood, the teachers of us both." In many branches of his work there was close contact with that of another pupil of Hardy, the late Professor E. C. Titchmarsh, so that it seems strangely coincidental that the news of his death should reach this country when its pure mathematicians were joining at Oxford in a memorial tribute to Titchmarsh under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society.
Wiener's outstanding contributions to mathematical analysis were all associated with the Fourier integral, which he employed in his great synthesis of Tauberian theorems, and in his celebrated proof of the prime number theorem—not the first, but none the less memorable. Closely linked with his work on the Fourier integral was his theory of general harmonic analysis, in which a deep understanding of spectral analysis in its concrete physical sense led him to new mathematical constructions of far-reaching significance. From this, it was just a short step to his celebrated prediction theory for stationary time series, which started life as a pattern for the design of anti-aircraft predictors and, as such, was one of the more notable secret scientific documents of World War II. Today, it is represented by one of the most powerful tools in the statistician's armoury.
A REMARKABLE UNITY
Wiener seems to have derived much of his inspiration from physical problems Frequently also his work has a remarkable unity so that links may now be discerned between the mathematical theories to which he contributed which remained below the surface until a much later date. Thus he was an early participant in the modern rigorous version of classical potential theory where he is famous for the construction of Wiener's test. He was also a leading architect of the theory of integration in function space, and this is commemorated by the name Wiener measure commonly given to the probability measure used to describe what is sometimes inaccurately called Brownian motion. Only recently through the work of Doob and others has the remarkable connection between Wiener measure and the Newtonian potential been made evident. This must have been a source of great satisfaction to Wiener, and he must also have felt grand paternal pride in the astonishing discovery by Feynman that Wiener integrals could be used in an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics and one which was of a highly practical character. Wiener's wartime interest in the anti-aircraft problem must have contributed a lot to his postwar work on automatic control devices, the general theory of which he liked to call cybernetics. When he wrote in the late 1940s about the second industrial revolution, many were disbelieving and contemptuous, yet now we see its effects on all sides.
He was intensely concerned about the social consequences of automation and foresaw many of today's most pressing problems and wrote extensively about them with imagination and vigour. His writings on cybernetics made a deep impression, especially on biologists and psychologists, and many who now try to chart the semi-automatic control capacities of men (and octopuses) must owe a great deal of their inspiration to him. The biological significance of this work was of great importance to Wiener himself, and this was a directing influence in all his later writings. As a human being, Wiener was above all stimulating. I have known some who found the stimulus unwelcome He could offend publicly by snoring through a lecture and then asking an awkward question in the discussion, and also privately by proffering information and advice on some field remotely from his own to an August dinner companion. I like to remember Wiener as I once saw him late at night in Magdalen College, Oxford, surrounded by a spellbound group of undergraduates, talking, endlessly talking. We are all the poorer that he now talks no more.
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MEN, MACHINES AND MATHEMATICS
Professor Norbert Wiener, the distinguished mathematician and expositor of the science of cybernetics, has died in Stockholm, as briefly reported by Reuter in later editions of The Times yesterday.
He was Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1932 to 1959 and at the time of his death was Emeritus Professor.
The son of Leo Wiener, sometime Professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, he was born on November 26, 1894, and educated at Ayer High School, Massachusetts, Tufts College, and at Harvard and Cornell Universities. Subsequently, he studied with Bertrand Russell and Hardy at Cambridge and at Göttingen with Hilbert and began his long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1919 when he was appointed instructor of mathematics He was honoured by academic and scientific bodies all over the world.
His books included The Fourier Integral and certain of its applications (1933); Cybernetics (1948) second enlarged edition 1961; Extrapolation and Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949); The Human Use of Human Beings (1950); Ex-prodigy (1953) and I am a Mathematician (1956): two essays in autobiography; Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958); and The Templar (1959).
Professor D. G. Kendall writes:
By the death of Norbert Wiener, the world has lost one of its most original, versatile, and influential mathematicians, who captured the imagination of his contemporaries to an extent unusual in one of his professions. In 1951, when he was perhaps at the height of his fame, the writer remembers seeing a hoarding on an Illinois highway carrying the inscription "The switch is to the Courier" accompanied by an unidentified but unmistakable portrait of Wiener (this was well before the days of top people advertisements). The legend goes back a long way for Wiener was that rare phenomenon—an infant prodigy who made good and, indeed, remained precocious to the end of his life. In his autobiographical work, I Am a Mathematician, Wiener left a fascinating record, not only of his personal progress, but of the very many celebrated mathematicians with whom he worked. It provides a portrait of an epoch, if a highly individual one Wiener had many links with this country, and English mathematicians remember with pride the dedication of his celebrated book with Paley, "To G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood, the teachers of us both." In many branches of his work there was close contact with that of another pupil of Hardy, the late Professor E. C. Titchmarsh, so that it seems strangely coincidental that the news of his death should reach this country when its pure mathematicians were joining at Oxford in a memorial tribute to Titchmarsh under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society.
Wiener's outstanding contributions to mathematical analysis were all associated with the Fourier integral, which he employed in his great synthesis of Tauberian theorems, and in his celebrated proof of the prime number theorem—not the first, but none the less memorable. Closely linked with his work on the Fourier integral was his theory of general harmonic analysis, in which a deep understanding of spectral analysis in its concrete physical sense led him to new mathematical constructions of far-reaching significance. From this, it was just a short step to his celebrated prediction theory for stationary time series, which started life as a pattern for the design of anti-aircraft predictors and, as such, was one of the more notable secret scientific documents of World War II. Today, it is represented by one of the most powerful tools in the statistician's armoury.
A REMARKABLE UNITY
Wiener seems to have derived much of his inspiration from physical problems Frequently also his work has a remarkable unity so that links may now be discerned between the mathematical theories to which he contributed which remained below the surface until a much later date. Thus he was an early participant in the modern rigorous version of classical potential theory where he is famous for the construction of Wiener's test. He was also a leading architect of the theory of integration in function space, and this is commemorated by the name Wiener measure commonly given to the probability measure used to describe what is sometimes inaccurately called Brownian motion. Only recently through the work of Doob and others has the remarkable connection between Wiener measure and the Newtonian potential been made evident. This must have been a source of great satisfaction to Wiener, and he must also have felt grand paternal pride in the astonishing discovery by Feynman that Wiener integrals could be used in an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics and one which was of a highly practical character. Wiener's wartime interest in the anti-aircraft problem must have contributed a lot to his postwar work on automatic control devices, the general theory of which he liked to call cybernetics. When he wrote in the late 1940s about the second industrial revolution, many were disbelieving and contemptuous, yet now we see its effects on all sides.
He was intensely concerned about the social consequences of automation and foresaw many of today's most pressing problems and wrote extensively about them with imagination and vigour. His writings on cybernetics made a deep impression, especially on biologists and psychologists, and many who now try to chart the semi-automatic control capacities of men (and octopuses) must owe a great deal of their inspiration to him. The biological significance of this work was of great importance to Wiener himself, and this was a directing influence in all his later writings. As a human being, Wiener was above all stimulating. I have known some who found the stimulus unwelcome He could offend publicly by snoring through a lecture and then asking an awkward question in the discussion, and also privately by proffering information and advice on some field remotely from his own to an August dinner companion. I like to remember Wiener as I once saw him late at night in Magdalen College, Oxford, surrounded by a spellbound group of undergraduates, talking, endlessly talking. We are all the poorer that he now talks no more.
