Amazon Book Description
- These two volumes ("Wiener (Norbert) - Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth" and I am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a 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).
Preface
- I have just finished dictating the last word of this book. It represents that part of my autobiography which dates roughly from my arrival at M.LT. in 1919, when I was twenty-four years old. The earlier part of my autobiography, under the title Ex-Prodigy, concerned my childhood and adolescence, while the present book is occupied with my mature personal and scientific career.
- It deals with my work, my travel, and my personal experiences, and I hope that it will give a fair account of my intellectual development. My problem has been to explain to a public that is generally not too deeply interested in science, and which is certainly not possessed of a technical acquaintance with it, the development of ideas which are fundamentally scientific. I have had as far as possible to eschew the technical vocabulary of science and to translate my concepts into everyday language. This is a splendid discipline for an author, but it also is a discipline which runs the risk of falling short of full success. While the use of scientific terms often results in jargon, to express any significant part of scientific ideas without the compact denotation and connotation which the history of science has given these terms is most difficult and is much less likely to be completely successful than the specifically literary critic may be aware.
- Thus, I have had two years discipline at a piece of work in which, by the nature of things, I must wait for the judgment of the public in order to be sure that I have achieved a measure of success. Why did I assume this uninviting labor, which at the best can add little to my stature as a working scientist and at the worst must offer new opportunities for those who may be inclined to criticize me? All in all, I don’t know. There certainly have been motives of literary vanity and the desire to show that, both as an individual and as a scientist I have been able to accomplish a task off my regular beat.
- Admitting this freely, there are other, more important motives. As in the first volume of my autobiography, so here, too, I wish to think out to myself what my career has meant and to come to that emotional peace which only a thorough consideration and understanding of one’s own past can bring. I have also wished to make this understanding available to young men coming up through similar careers in mathematics and the other sciences. I have felt that the scientist, his mode of life, and the demands on him are not sufficiently known to the larger intellectual public, and I believe that here I have the duty of exegesis. Then, finally, I have not had any previous opportunity to write up many ideas — treated singly in my existing literary work — in the form of a consistent historical account of how I came by them.
- I should like to mention, among the colleagues with whom I have discussed this undertaking, Professor Karl Deutsch of the M.I.T. Department of Humanities; Professor Armand Siegel of Boston University; Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, formerly of the Medical Department at M.I.T. and now professor of hygiene at Harvard University; and Dr. Morris Chafetz. In addition, I wish to give my thanks to the several members of the sequence of secretaries who have taken my dictation, who have ex- pressed their criticism of my ideas, and who have helped put my work into printable form.
→ Norbert Wiener, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washington’s Birthday, 1955
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)