Amazon Book Description
- These two volumes ("Wiener (Norbert) - I am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy" 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.
- Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) served on the faculty in the Department of Mathematics at MIT from 1919 until his death. In 1963, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to mathematics, engineering, and biological sciences. He was the author of many books, including Norbert Wiener ― A Life in Cybernetics and the National Book Award-winning God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (both published by the MIT Press).
Introduction
- As this book will show, at one period I was an infant prodigy in the full sense of the word, for I entered college before the age of twelve, obtained my bachelor’s degree before fifteen, and my doctorate before nineteen. Yet any man who has reached the age of fifty-seven is certainly no longer an infant prodigy; and if he has accomplished anything in life, whatever temporary conspicuousness he may have had as a prodigy has lost all importance in view of the much greater issues of success or failure in his later life.
- But the present book does not attempt to be an evaluation of my whole life for better or for worse. It is rather the study of a period in which I underwent a rather unusual and early course of education, and of the subsequent period in which the unevenness and irregularity thus accentuated in my nature had an opportunity to work themselves out in such a way that I could consider myself launched on an active career both as a scholar and as a citizen of the world. The infant prodigy or Wunderkind is a child who has achieved an appreciable measure of adult intellectual standing before he is out of the years usually devoted to a secondary school education. The word “prodigy” cannot be interpreted as either a boast of success or a jeremiad of failure.
- The prodigies whom we generally call to mind are either people like John Stuart Mill and Blaise Pascal, who had proceeded from a precocious youth to an effective adult career, or their antitheses, who have found the transition between early precocity and later effectiveness one which they have become too specialized to make. Yet there is nothing in the word itself which restricts us to these two opposite cases. It is perfectly conceivable that after an especially early start, a child may find a place in life in which he has a good, modest measure of success without having stormed Olympus.
- The reason infant prodigies are generally adjudged in terms of immense failure or immense success is that they are somewhat rare phenomena, known by hearsay to the public; and, therefore, the only ones the public ever hears of are those who “point a moral or adorn a tale.” There is a tragedy in the failure of a promising lad which makes his fate interesting reading; and the charm of the success story is known to all of us. Per contra, the account of a moderate success following a sensationally promising childhood is an anticlimax and not worth general attention.
- I consider this attitude of extremes toward the infant prodigy false and unjustified. In addition to being unjustified, it is in fact unjust; for this feeling of anticlimax which the story of the moderately successful prodigy excites in the reader leads the prodigy to a self-distrust which may be disastrous. It takes an extremely solid character to step down gracefully from the dais of the prodigy onto the more modest platform of the routine teacher or the laboratory floor of the adequate but secondary research man. Thus the child prodigy who is not in fact a prodigy of moral strength as well must make a career success on a large scale, for want of which he is likely to consider himself a failure, and actually to become one.
- The sentimentality with which the adult regards the experiences of a child is no genuine part of a child’s attitude toward himself. To the grownup, it is lovable and right for the child to be confused, to be at a loss in the world of adults around him; but it is far from a pleasant experience for the child. To be immersed in a world which he cannot understand is to suffer from an inferiority which has no charms whatever for him. It may be ingratiating and amusing to his seniors to observe his struggles in a half-understood world, but it is no more pleasant for him to realize that his environment is too much for him to cope with than it would be for an adult under the same circumstances.
- Our present age is sundered from that of the Victorian by many changes, not least among which is the fact that Sigmund Freud has lived, and that no one can write a book nowadays without being aware of his ideas. There is a great temptation to write an autobiography in the Freudian jargon, more especially when a large part of it is devoted to the very Freudian theme of father-and-son conflict. Nevertheless, I shall avoid the use of this terminology. I do not consider that the work of Freud is so final that we should freeze our ideas by adopting the technical language of what is certainly nothing but the contemporary phase of a rapidly growing subject. Yet I cannot deny that Freud has turned over the stone of the human mind and has shown a great population of pale and emotionally photophobic creatures scuttling back into their holes. However, I do not accept all Freudian dogmas as unquestionable truth. I do not consider that the present vogue of the emotional striptease is a wholly good thing. But, let my reader make no mistake: the resemblance between many of the ideas of this book and certain of the notions of Freud is not purely coincidental; and if he finds that he can carry out the exercise of translating my statements into Freudian jargon, he should consider that I am quite aware of this possibility and have rejected it deliberately.
Book Comment
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)