|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Wiener Norbert. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Those who created a new direction in science are few. There are even fewer people who have created new sciences. One such giant is Norbert Wiener. His offspring, cybernetics - the science of control and communications in machines and living organisms, was born from an alloy of mathematics and biology, sociology, and economics that did not intersect before. Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, to a Jewish family. His father, Leo Wiener, a native of Bialystok, which used to belong to Russia, studied in Germany, then moved to the USA, became a philologist, and headed the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard University in Cambridge. In his autobiographical book, Wiener claimed that he remembered himself from the age of two. He learned to read at the age of four, and at six he was already reading Darwin and Dante. Constant employment and passion for science alienated him from his peers. The situation was aggravated by acute myopia and congenital clumsiness. At the age of nine, he entered a secondary school, where children of 15-16 years old began to study, having previously completed an eight-year school. Here the barrier between him and fellow students became even more pronounced, Norbert grew up as an unbalanced child prodigy. He graduated from high school when he was eleven. Immediately the boy entered the institution of higher education Tufts College. After graduating, at the age of fourteen, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then he studied at Harvard and Cornell Universities, at the age of 17 he became a master of arts at Harvard, at 18 - a doctor of philosophy with a degree in mathematical logic. Harvard University awarded Wiener a scholarship to study at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities. In Cambridge, Wiener listened to B. Russell's lectures, participated in his seminar, attended G. Hardy's lectures recommended by him. After the course of B. Russell, Wiener became convinced that it was impossible to study the philosophy of mathematics without knowing this science in depth. Before the First World War, in the spring of 1914, Wiener moved to Göttingen, where he studied at the university with E. Landau and the great D. Hilbert. At the beginning of the war, Wiener returned to the United States. At Columbia University, he began to study topology, but he did not finish what he started. In the 1915/1916 academic year, Wiener taught mathematics at Harvard University as an assistant. Viner spent the next academic year as an employee at the University of Maine. After the US entered the war, Wiener worked at the General Electric plant, from where he moved to the editorial office of the American Encyclopedia in Albany. Then Norbert participated for some time in compiling tables of artillery firing at the range, where he was even enlisted in the army, but was soon fired due to myopia. Then he got by with articles in newspapers, wrote two papers on algebra, following the publication of which he received the recommendation of mathematics professor W. F. Osgood, and in 1919 he entered the position of assistant in the department of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Thus began his service in this institute, which lasted all his life. Here Wiener got acquainted with the content of the statistical mechanics of W. Gibbs. He managed to connect its main provisions with Lebesgue integration in the study of Brownian motion and wrote several articles. The same approach turned out to be possible in establishing the essence of the shot effect in connection with the passage of electric current through wires or through electron tubes. In the autumn of 1920, the International Congress of Mathematicians took place in Strasbourg. Wiener decided to arrive in Europe early to meet and work with some mathematicians. The case forced him to linger in France: the steamer on which he was sailing ran stern onto a rock and received a large hole. The team managed to moor at Le Havre. In France, Wiener met Maurice Fréchet and after talking with him became interested in the generalization of vector spaces. Fréchet did not immediately appreciate the result obtained by the young scientist, but a few months later, after reading Stefan Banach's publication on the same topic in a Polish mathematical journal, he changed his mind. For some time such spaces were called Banach-Wiener spaces. Returning to the United States, Wiener is intensively engaged in science. In 1920-1925, he solved physical and technical problems with the help of abstract mathematics and found new patterns in the theory of Brownian motion, potential theory, and harmonic analysis. When Wiener was working on potential theory, the "Reports" of the French Academy of Sciences published similar materials by A. Lebesgue and his student J. L. Bouligan. Wiener wrote the paper and sent it to Lebesgue to be sent to Doklady. Buligan also designed the article. Both notes appeared in the same issue of the journal with a preface by Lebesgue. Buligan recognized the superiority of Wiener's work and invited him to his place. This was the second competition Winer won; in the first, he outpaced two doctoral students of Harvard University professor O. D. Kellogg in potential research. In 1922, 1924 and 1925, Wiener visited Europe with friends and relatives of the family. In 1925, he made a presentation in Göttingen about his work on generalized harmonic analysis, which interested Hilbert, Courant, and Born. Subsequently, Wiener realized that his results were to some extent related to the quantum theory that was developing at that time. At the same time, Wiener met one of the designers of computers - W. Bush, and expressed the idea that once came to his mind of a new harmonic analyzer. Bush made it happen. Wiener met Margarethe Endeman from a German family and decided to marry her. Their wedding took place in the spring of 1926, before Wiener's trip to Göttingen. The couple made a trip to Europe, during which Wiener met with mathematicians. In Dusseldorf, he made a report at the congress of the German League for the Promotion of Science, after which he met R. Schmidt, who was conducting research in the field of Tauberian theorems. Schmidt drew attention to the application of the general Tauberian theorem to the problem of the distribution of prime numbers. Wiener then obtained significant results in this area. During his stay in Copenhagen, he met H. Bohr. On the way to the United States, the couple visited London, where Wiener met with Hardy. In 1926, D. Ya. Stroykh came to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After returning from Europe, Wiener took up with him the application of the ideas of differential geometry to differential equations, including the Schrödinger equation. The work was a success. Wiener was convinced that mental work "wears out a person to the limit", so he must alternate with physical rest. He always took advantage of every opportunity to take walks, swam, played various games, and enjoyed communicating with non-mathematicians. The couple bought a house in the countryside, in 1927 their eldest daughter, Barbara, was born, and worries increased. Wiener's promotion was slow. He tried to get a decent job in other countries, it didn't work out. But the time has come, finally, and luck. At a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, Wiener met Ya. D. Tamarkin, a Gottingen acquaintance who always spoke highly of his work. The same support was provided to him by Hardy, who repeatedly visited the United States. And this influenced Wiener's position: thanks to Tamarkin and Hardy, he became famous in America. The outbreak of the Great Depression affected the state of science in the country. Many scientists were more interested in the stock exchange than in their immediate affairs. Wiener, who by that time already had two children, nevertheless firmly believed that his appointment was "to engage in science himself and to involve gifted students in independent scientific work." Doctoral dissertations were defended under his supervision. He especially noted the Chinese Yuk Wing Lee and the Japanese Shikao Ikehara. Lee collaborated with Bush in the field of electrical engineering and began to put into practice the idea that came to Wiener of a new device for electrical circuits. The device was created and subsequently patented. Since then, Lee has collaborated with Wiener for a long time. Ikehara improved the methods found by Wiener in the theory of prime numbers. At the same time, Wiener met with Bush and discussed the fundamental structure of his machine; he formulated the main ideas of digital computers built much later. Bush thought of publishing a book on electrical circuits, consulted with Wiener on some issues and asked him to write about the Fourier method. The joint work of Wiener with E. Hopf, who came from Germany to Harvard University, turned out to be especially significant, as a result of which the “Wiener-Hopf equation” was included in science, which describes the radiative equilibrium of stars, as well as related to other problems that deal with two different regimes separated by a border. In 1929, the Swedish journal Akta Mathematica and the American Annals of Mathematics published two large final articles by Wiener on generalized harmonic analysis. Since 1932, Wiener has been a professor at MIT. At Harvard, he met the physiologist A. Rosenbluth and began to attend his methodological seminar, which brought together representatives of various sciences. This seminar played an important role in shaping Wiener's ideas of cybernetics. After Rosenbluth's departure for Mexico City, seminar sessions were held sometimes in Mexico City, sometimes at MIT. Then Wiener was invited to take part in the activities of the National Academy of Sciences. Acquainted with the orders that reigned there, flourishing intrigue, he left her. He was still active in the Mathematical Society, in 1935-1936 he was its vice-president and he was awarded the society's prestigious prize for his work on analysis. In 1934, Wiener received an invitation from Tsinghua University (in Beijing) to give a course of lectures on mathematics and electrical engineering. The initiator of this was Lee, who worked at the university. Viner traveled with his family through Japan to China; Ikehara met him in Tokyo. At the same time, he worked with Lee to improve Bush's analog computer. Upon returning, it was decided to get to the International Mathematical Congress in Oslo. During a long journey across the oceans and seas, Wiener, taking advantage of forced leisure, wrote the novel "The Tempter" about the fate of one inventor (published in 1959). He considered the year of his visit to China the year of his full development as a scientist. During the war, Wiener devoted almost entirely his work to military affairs. He investigates the problem of aircraft movement during anti-aircraft fire. Thinking and experimenting convinced Wiener that the fire control system of anti-aircraft artillery should be a feedback system, that feedback also plays an essential role in the human body. An increasing role is played by predictive processes, which cannot be carried out solely on human consciousness. The computers that existed at that time did not have the necessary speed. This forced Wiener to formulate a number of requirements for such machines. In fact, he predicted the paths that electronic computers would follow in the future. Computing devices, in his opinion, "should consist of vacuum tubes, and not of gears or electromechanical relays. This is necessary to ensure sufficient fast action." The next requirement was that computing devices "should use a more economical binary rather than a decimal number system." The machine, Wiener believed, must itself correct its actions, it is necessary to develop the ability for self-learning in it. To do this, it must be provided with a memory block where control signals would be stored, as well as the information that the machine will receive during operation. If earlier the machine was only an executive body, entirely dependent on the will of man, now it has become thinking and acquired a certain degree of independence. In 1943, an article by Wiener, Rosenbluth, Byglow "Behavior, purposefulness and teleology" was published, which is an outline of the cybernetic method. In his memoirs, Wiener wrote that in the summer of 1946 he was invited to France in the city of Nancy for a mathematical conference. On the way to Nancy, he stops in London and gets acquainted with the research of his colleagues. In his head, the idea had long been ripening to write a book and tell in it about the generality of the laws in force in the field of automatic regulation, the organization of production, and in the human nervous system. He even managed to persuade the Parisian publisher Feyman to publish this future book. He hesitated for a long time, but decided to take a chance. After returning from the conference, Wiener went to Mexico and worked with the Rosenbluths for about a year on a commissioned book. Immediately there was a difficulty with the title, the content was too unusual. It was required to find a word related to management, regulation. The Greek word for "helmsman" came to mind, which in English sounds like "cybernetics". So Wiener left him. The book was published in 1948 by the New York publishing house "John Wheely and Suns" and the Parisian "Hermann et Tsi" Wiener was no longer young. He suffered from cataracts, clouding of the lens of the eye, and had poor vision. There was an operation, which at that time was considered quite complicated. Hence the numerous errors and misprints in the text of the edition. “The book appeared in a sloppy form,” Viner recalled, “because proofreading took place at a time when eye troubles deprived me of the opportunity to read, and the young assistants who helped me did not take their duties well enough.” With the publication of "Cybernetics" Wiener, as they say, "woke up famous." “The appearance of the book,” he wrote, “in the blink of an eye turned me from a scientist-worker, enjoying a certain authority in his special field, into something like a figure of public importance. It was pleasant, but it also had its negative sides.” Cybernetics immediately gained a roaring popularity. She has become fashion. Even some artists, in order to keep up with life, organized something like a "cybernetic" direction in art. Fiction writers have done a particularly good job. What kind of apocalyptic horrors they did not draw. Wiener himself considered J.K. Maxwell to be the founder of modern control theory, and this is absolutely right. The theory of automatic control was mainly formulated by J. Maxwell, I. Vyshnegradsky, A. Lyapunov and A. Stodola. What is the merit of N. Wiener? Perhaps his book is simply a compilation of known information, bringing together well-known but disparate material? His merit is that he first understood the fundamental importance of information in management processes. Speaking about control and communication in living organisms and machines, he saw the main thing not just in the words "control" and "communication", but in their combination, just as in the theory of relativity it is not the fact of the finiteness of the interaction speed that is important, but the combination of this fact with the concept of simultaneity of events occurring at different points in space. Cybernetics is the science of information management, and Wiener can rightfully be considered the creator of this science. All the years after the release of Cybernetics, Wiener propagated its ideas. In 1950, a sequel was published - "Human Use of Human Beings", in 1958 - "Nonlinear Problems in the Theory of Stochastic Processes", in 1961 - the second edition of "Cybernetics", in 1963 - a kind of cybernetic essay "Joint-Stock Company God and Golem" . In recent years, Wiener's inquisitive mind has penetrated biology, neurology, electroencephalography, and genetics. Wiener is one of the few scientists who have written in detail about themselves. He published two remarkable books about his life and work - "Former child prodigy" (1951) and "I am a mathematician" (1956). In the books, the author also expounded his views on the development of mankind, the role of science, the value of communication between scientists. Wiener died on March 18, 1964 in Stockholm. Author: Samin D.K.
▪ Vernadsky Vladimir. Biography
Machine for thinning flowers in gardens
02.05.2024 Advanced Infrared Microscope
02.05.2024 Air trap for insects
01.05.2024
▪ Leap Motion keyboard works without touch ▪ China's high-tech development
▪ section of the site Civil radio communications. Article selection ▪ Napoleon I Bonaparte article. Famous aphorisms ▪ article Which philosopher was an Olympic champion? Detailed answer ▪ article Warehouse Operations and Customer Relations Manager. Job description ▪ article Programmable code lock. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering ▪ article Loop does not grab the finger. Focus Secret
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page