The MIT Press

5 total works

Invention

by Norbert Wiener

Published 2 March 1993

Internationally honored for brilliant achievements throughout his career, author of "Cybernetics, ExProdigy, " and the essay "God and Golem, Inc., "which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Wiener had an abiding concern about the ethics guiding applications of theories he and other scientists developed. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener's day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.Wiener provides an engagingly written insider's understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener's comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the "free-lance" scientist are particularly pertinent today.Steve Heims provides a brief history of Wiener's literary output and reviews his contributions to the field of invention and discovery. In addition, Heims suggests significant ways in which Wiener's ideas still apply to dilemmas facing the scientific and engineering communities of the 1990s. Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nonlinear Problems In Random Theory

by Norbert Wiener

Published 15 December 1958

A series of lectures on the role of nonlinear processes in physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, physiology, and communication theory. From the preface: "For some time I have been interested in a group of phenomena depending upon random processes. One the one hand, I have recorded the random shot effect as a suitable input for testing nonlinear circuits. On the other hand, for some of the work that Professor W. A. Rosenblith and I have been doing concerning the nature of the electroencephalogram, and in particular of the alpha rhythm, it has occurred to me to use the model of a system of random nonlinear oscillators excited by a random input.... At the beginning we had contemplated a series of only four or five lectures. My ideas developed pari passu with the course, and by the end of the term we found ourselves with a set of fifteen lectures. The last few of these were devoted to the application of my ideas to problems in the statistical mechanics of gases. This work is both new and tentative, and I found that I had to supplement my course by the writing over of these with the help of Professer Y. W. Lee. "

Ex-Prodigy

by Norbert Wiener

Published 15 August 1964

These two volumes (I Am Mathematician and Ex-Prodigy) comprise Norbert Wiener's autobiography. Sometimes with humor and sometimes with sadness, they render an account, without sentiment, of the life of the world-renowned mathematician and scientist. An unusual life story, Norbert Wiener's penetrating observations accompany the fascinating details describing the maturation of a major world scientist.

I Am a Mathematician

by Norbert Wiener

Published 15 August 1964

These two volumes (I Am Mathematician and Ex-Prodigy) comprise Norbert Wiener's autobiography. Sometimes with humor and sometimes with sadness, they render an account, without sentiment, of the life of the world-renowned mathematician and scientist. An unusual life story, Norbert Wiener's penetrating observations accompany the fascinating details describing the maturation of a major world scientist.

Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series

by Norbert Wiener

Published 15 March 1964

A book thatbecame the basis for modern communication theory, by a scientist considered one of the founders of the field of artifical intelligence.

Some predict that Norbert Wiener will be remembered for his Extrapolation long after Cybernetics is forgotten. Indeed, few computer science students would know today what cybernetics is all about, while every communication student knows what Wiener's filter is. The original work was circulated as a classified memorandum in 1942, because it was connected with sensitive wartime efforts to improve radar communication. This book became the basis for modern communication theory, by a scientist considered one of the founders of the field of artifical intelligence. Combining ideas from statistics and time-series analysis, Wiener used Gauss's method of shaping the characteristic of a detector to allow for the maximal recognition of signals in the presence of noise. This method came to be known as the "Wiener filter."