Norbert Wiener invention. norbert wiener biography

Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, to a Jewish family. 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. He graduated from high school when he was eleven. Immediately entered the higher educational institution 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 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. In 1919, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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.

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. In 1926, D.Ya. came to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stroykh. Wiener, together with him, took up the application of the ideas of differential geometry to differential equations, including the Schrödinger equation.

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.

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. 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.

Best of the day

In 1943, an article by Wiener, Rosenbluth, Byglow "Behavior, purposefulness and teleology" was published, which is an outline of the cybernetic method.

In Wiener's 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 managed to persuade the Parisian publisher Feyman to publish this future 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 John Wheely and Suns in New York and Hermann et Tsi in Paris. 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. 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" .

Management classics. Wiener Norbert

Publication information courtesy of but publishing house Peter

Wiener Norbert (1894-1964), Wiener, Norbert

1. Introduction
2. Main contribution
3. Practical application of the main ideas

Brief biographical information

Main works

(1948)
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950)
ex-prodigy (1952)
I am a Mathematician (1956)
God and Golem Inc. (1964)
Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1993)

Summary

Norbert Wiener was the father of cybernetics, a new science that emerged at the intersection of several scientific disciplines shortly after the end of World War II. Cybernetics established links between wartime science and post-war social science through the development of a non-causal and ecological vision of both physical and biological systems. In his works devoted to cybernetics, N. Wiener demonstrated the presence of invariants in the mechanisms of control and information transmission of living beings and machines. Cybernetic principles provided, on the one hand, the foundations for the creation of many technical devices, such as radars, information networks, computers, and artificial limbs, and, on the other hand, helped develop fundamental approaches to the study of such phenomena of the living world as learning, memory, and intelligence. Cybernetic ideas have been applied and further developed in the management sciences, as well as in a wider sociological context.

1. Introduction

Norbert Wiener possessed extraordinary mathematical abilities and already at the age of 19 he managed to get a Ph.D. from Harvard University (Harvard University). The bulk of his academic career has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has written 11 books and over 200 articles for various scientific journals as a professor of mathematics. From the first early works devoted to the creation of a mathematical theory of Brownian motion and mathematical models for quantum mechanics (in the 1920s - the most important problems of theoretical physics), N. Wiener proved himself to be a remarkable mathematician, having managed to supplement the natural science content of his works with original personal philosophy. For N. Wiener, mathematical theories were special conditions in which general philosophical ideas were concretized. His philosophical approach implied a unified view of the world, including the people existing in it, a world in which everything is interconnected, but in which the most general principles have elements of uncertainty (Heims, 1980: 140, 156). Such a holistic (or ecological) vision of nature, proposed by scientists working in the first half of the 20th century, was far ahead of its time.

2. Main contribution

During World War II, the US Office of Research and Development prioritized work on the long-term atomic bomb project, as well as the more urgent task of finding ways to destroy German bombers. While the main work on the creation of the atomic bomb was carried out at Los Alamos, research on ways to detect, escort and destroy aircraft was carried out mainly inMIT, where N. Wiener was responsible for the development of the mathematical apparatus necessary for solving this problem. In collaboration with the young engineer Julian Bigelow, N. Wiener developed a fairly general mathematical theory of predicting the best futures from incomplete information about the past. This theory contributed to a revolutionary revolution in the practice of creating means of communication and laid the foundation for the modern statistical theory of communication and information (Heims, 1980: 184). At that time (1940s), this theory immediately led to a significant improvement in the methods of tracking aircraft using radar and was successfully used in the creation of noise filtering devices for radios, telephones and many other general-purpose devices (Wiener, 1993). This work was carried out by N. Wiener at about the same time when, independently of him, Claude Shannon created his “mathematical theory of information transmission” (Shannon and Weaver, 1949).
One of the most interesting aspects of the air defense problem was the creation of a feedback loop: information from the radar screen was used to calculate the corrections needed in the control of weapons to improve targeting accuracy, and then the effectiveness of these corrections was tracked and displayed using the radar, then this new the information was again used to clarify the aiming of the weapon at the target, etc. If the calculations in this process were carried out automatically, then such a system worked as a self-controlled one; if the calculations were not automated, then the whole system, including the people acting in it, was also self-governing. N. Wiener's most important guess was precisely that similar feedback mechanisms are used in all types of purposeful activity, for example, in the case when we take an ordinary pencil from the table. Here, information, taken in mainly through observation, is continuously used to control our arm muscles until the moment we successfully complete the task. N. Wiener discussed his ideas in this area with the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueet, who suggested that some common disorders of the nervous system, known as ataxias (impaired coordination of movements), can be explained in terms of the inaccuracy of the feedback system. If you offer a cigarette to a person suffering from ataxia, he will stretch his hand further than it takes to take it from the table. Then he will make useless movements in the opposite direction, and then again in the original, so that his actions will resemble an oscillatory process that does not lead to the goal.
The idea that with the help of mathematical formulas some parallels can be found between mechanical devices and living organisms has received support from many representatives of various sciences. On March 8, 1946, twenty-one prominent scientists gathered in a New York hotel to discuss such ideas. This meeting was the first in a series of scientific conferences sponsored byMacy Foundation- during which the basic principles of the new science of cybernetics were formulated. A group of scientists who regularly participated in these meetings in 1946-1953. called the "cybernetic group" (Heims, 1991). It included such scientists as the eminent mathematician John von Neumann, the neuropsychiatrist Warren McCullach, the social scientist Gregory Bateson, as well as Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener himself.

In his classic bookCybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (“Cybernetics or Control and Communication in Animals and Machines”) (1948) N. Wiener outlined and described the foundations of cybernetics, one of the youngest scientific disciplines of the 20th century. The name of science used by N. Wiener goes back to the ancient Greeks and literally means “the art of management”. When choosing it, N. Wiener wanted to emphasize the recognition of the fact that the first significant work devoted to the action of the feedback mechanism was an article on controllers by Clark Maxwell (1868) and that the term "regulator" (Governor) comes from a corruption of the Latin wordgovernorate. Plato used this term to refer to the science of managing ships, while in the 19th century. the French scientist André Ampère borrowed it to define the science of management.
By demonstrating the fact that there is a fundamental similarity between the control mechanisms used in various sciences, cybernetics was able to eliminate the long-standing philosophical contradiction between vitalism and the mechanism, according to which biological and mechanical systems had a fundamentally different nature. In fact, cybernetics, in accordance with the philosophical position of N. Wiener, allowed a much broader classification of systems, and thus showed its interdisciplinary character (Wiener, 1993: 84). A useful criterion for making this classification is the notion of complexity, according to which the main interest of cybernetics is the study of complex (that is, so complex that they cannot be described in a detailed and detailed way) and stochastic (as opposed to deterministic) systems (beer, 1959: 18). Typical examples of such systems are the economy, the human brain, and a commercial company.
To study the mechanism of control and transmission of information in such systems, N. Wiener and his colleagues developed the concepts of feedback, homeostasis, and “black box”. Although we have discussed the feedback mechanism earlier, it is useful to analyze its main characteristics in more detail. Each feedback loop involves the use of input information (eg, temperature measurements) and output (eg, heater operation data); in addition - and this is of the utmost importance - information at the input is affected by the output, for example, the power of the heater will determine the reading taken from the thermometer, which, in turn, will affect the signal to turn on or turn off the heater. Thus, there is a continuous monitoring of the discrepancy between the desired and the actual situation. If the control mechanism acts in the direction of reducing this discrepancy, then such feedback is called negative (as in the case of a thermostat); if the feedback increases the discrepancy, then it is called positive (as in the case of a mechanical brake that captures the initial movements of the driver's hand and then strengthens them until it can stop a moving car).

In his book Cybernetics(“Cybernetics”) (1948) N. Wiener showed that feedback mechanisms are present in many systems of a fundamentally different nature - from mechanical to economic and from sociological to biological. A special type of feedback that is essential for the maintenance of life is present in the so-called phenomenon of homeostasis. The classic biological example is blood temperature homeostasis, which allows the body temperature to remain virtually unchanged despite the body moving from a cold to a warm environment. Thus, a regulating device is called a homeostat, to maintain certain variables within given limits. So, a typical example of a homeostat is the steam pressure regulator in a steam locomotive created by J. Watt, designed to control its speed at various load values. Here it is extremely important to understand that the controlled variable going beyond the desired limits (when the speed of the locomotive is too fast or too slow) itself acts as a feedback (when there is a corresponding closing or opening of the valves in the Watt regulator). In other words, as long as the mechanism itself is functioning, its feedback will also work properly. This conclusion is of great importance, since it implies that the controller feedback will always be guaranteed to compensate not only for this type of disturbance, but also for disturbances of any type (beer, 1959: 29). This special property of control systems is commonly referred to as ultrastability (Ashby, 1956).
Now it should be clear to us that the concept of "control" in cybernetics does not come down to a naive idea of ​​the process of coercion, but implies the implementation of self-regulation.
Another important concept of cybernetics that has become widespread in many other sciences is the “black box”. Cybernetics, as noted above, is mainly concerned with the study of the mechanisms of control and transmission of information in complex stochastic systems. To study the control process, cybernetics use the concepts of feedback and homeostasis; they use statistical information theory to analyze the probabilistic characteristics of systems; finally, they study the complexity of systems with the help of the concept of a black box. By presenting the system as a black box, cyberneticians default to the cognitive limitations of their understanding of the vast number of possible states available to a complex system at any given time. However, they also recognize the possibility of manipulating some of the input signals and observing some of the results of the system's output. If the outputs are continuously compared to specific desired values, then some of the system's responses can be determined in terms of their effect on the black box inputs so as to keep the system "in control."
When modeling a system as a black box, four sets of variables are identified: a set of possible system states (S); a set of perturbations that can affect its current state (R); set of responses to these perturbations (R); a set of goals defining acceptable states according to established criteria (T). A system is considered to be in a “controlled state” if at any time its state corresponds to the state from the setT. With the help of this model, an extremely important cybernetic principle is established: if the system is in a controlled state, then it is necessary that for any perturbation that seeks to bring the system out of admissible states, there is such a reaction that, after its implementation, would bring the system into one of the states from the setT. This principle was developed by the English cyberneticist Ross Ashby and was called the “law of necessary variety”, usually formulated as follows: “only variety can absorb variety” (Ashby, 1956).
N. Wiener gained experience with computing devices at the very beginning of his scientific career (Wiener, 1993). Back in the 1920s, long before the creation of the first computers, he developed a method for calculating a certain group of integrals by passing a beam through special filters and then measuring the intensity of the received light flux. This new device was, in fact, an analog computer, and was called the “Wiener Integraph”. Approximately twenty years later, in 1940, N. Wiener sent a memorandum to the American government, in which he described five characteristics that the future computer should have: it had to be digital, not analog; use the binary number system; be created on the basis of electronic elements; its logic scheme had to follow the principles on which the Turing machine was created; In a computer, magnetic tape should have been used to store information. Although this memorandum was ignored by government officials for many years, some of his ideas, put forward independently by N. Wiener by other scientists, formed the basis for the creation of modern high-speed computers.

3. Practical application of the main ideas

Many of the early studies now associated with the creation of cybernetics were devoted to the design and construction of various devices. Electronic models of turtles, created by the British neurologist Gray Walter, clearly demonstrated that the combination of several simple mechanisms using the right feedback allows you to implement almost the same complex behaviors as in living systems. Around the same time, the English cybernetician Gordon Pask developed a learning machine, starting the process that would eventually lead to the writing and publication of his famousConversational Theory(“Conversion (conversational) theory”) (1975). G. Pask's machine displayed the information that was to be learned, received from the student the answer to the question asked, and used it as a feedback signal to improve the learning process. Thus, this machine, constantly adapting to the capabilities of the student, could be used for teaching. N. Wiener himself in the 1950s and early 1960s. paid much attention to the creation of devices for the replacement of amputated limbs, also trying to reproduce their tactile sensitivity. His collaboration with a group of orthopedic surgeons, neurologists and engineers (although unsuccessful at the time) charted the way for the subsequent creation of a prosthesis, called the Boston arm.
This work with various devices had the dual purpose of (1) demonstrating the feasibility of practical applications of cybernetic ideas and (2) promoting the study of complex systems similar to the human nervous system, as well as a better understanding of such properties of living beings as learning, memory and intelligence. As an example of the study of intelligence, N. Wiener in the second edition of his book on cybernetics (Wiener, 1961) explained in detail how a machine could be made capable of playing chess at an acceptably high level. At present, almost any PC is able to defeat almost any amateur chess player. Unfortunately, due to, among other things, the initial attempts at practical application of cybernetic ideas, the whole new scientific discipline as a whole became associated with real equipment, especially computers, despite the fact that its principles were still used in other disciplines.
In the field of management theory, the most significant development of the ideas of N. Wiener was carried out by Stafford Beer, who, modeling a company in the form of a set of interconnected homeostats and using Ashby's law on the required diversity, created a model of a viable system - MHS (beer, 1979, 1981, 1985). The MHS, which has become an important achievement in the direction of cybernetics, called managerial cybernetics, has turned out to be a useful tool for diagnosing and even designing complex systems - from small firms to large international companies and from local governments to the state economy as a whole (Espejo and Harnden, 1989).
In the late 1970s some social scientists have tried to develop and enrich cybernetics by combining it with sociology and creating the so-called "socio-cybernetics". However, along the way, they encountered some problems, the solution of which seemed to be extremely difficult for them (Geyer and Zouwen, 1986). Only subsequent work in the field of research on the biological aspects of the process of cognition (see, for example,Maturana and Varela, 1987; Foerster, 1984) laid the foundation for the successful development of social cybernetics. This science, known as “second-order cybernetics” (Foerster, 1979) is an example of a non-objectivist approach to scientific inquiry that emphasizes the role of the observer in social systems.
Thus, second-order cybernetics, by emphasizing the importance of the independence of individuals and studying the continuous processes by which they create a common reality, points to the possibility of a new paradigm in social research, which could provide - referring to the title of one of N. Wiener's books - more “ humane use of human beings”.

Norbert Wiener is the father of cybernetics, without which it is now impossible to imagine our life, and everything that happens in it.

Like his future "creations", Norbert from childhood was "programmed" for a certain fate. The dictates of his father, under whose authority the future scientist happened to be formed as a person, was tangible literally from the first conscious steps of Wiener's life. Norbert's father himself was a very remarkable person, and although there is an opinion that "nature rests on the children of geniuses", in this case everything turned out exactly the opposite - everything that was genetically laid down, Wiener managed to develop and increase, subsequently rising to the level iconic personalities who made an invaluable contribution to the development of scientific thought, the consequences of which we feel at every step, and in the long term, humanity has yet to evaluate the foundation that was laid by people like Norbert Wiener in the pyramid of knowledge development of human civilization.

Norbert Wiener was born in November 1894 in Missouri, where the Wiener family moved from the Polish city of Bialystok, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, in addition to being a fairly well-known philologist by the time his son was born, is also famous for translating the twenty-four-volume collected works of Leo Tolstoy from Russian into English. Here is what Norbert himself wrote about his father: “He became a scientist rather due to his character traits than due to any special training” . Of course, books in the Wiener family occupied a dominant position, and little Norbert could not get away from this, and, apparently, he did not resist much. The future "father of cybernetics" began to read a little later than he could walk, and from that moment on he felt his father's demands on himself, who had high hopes for the heir. Norbert himself, without coercion, did what he liked, for example, by the age of 7 he realized the theory of Darwinism, while his father had a hand in his son's study of languages ​​and mathematics. Norbert was literally a "wunderkind", and subsequently, without false modesty, he called himself that. And there was a lot of evidence for this - at the age of 11, Wiener graduated from a college course, at 14 he received a bachelor's degree, at 17 he became a master of arts, and at 18 - a doctor of philosophy. Impressive, isn't it? However, this was only the beginning of a long journey.

Speaking about successful people, we sometimes ask ourselves, due to what they, these very “successful”, become such? And how are they different from the rest? Speaking about our hero, it is worth noting that he possessed a full range of qualities that characterize a typical scientist familiar to us from old Soviet films. Today's youth calls such "nerds". A typical appearance is a beard and glasses, non-standard, and sometimes strange judgments, and, most importantly, the presence of a permanent dissenting opinion. There were stories about Wiener's forgetfulness, which gradually turned into anecdotes. Here is one of them:
Somehow his family moved to live on another street. Wife, knowing Wiener's forgetfulness, always wrote him notes with the address where they live. Wiener lost the note, somehow remembered the way, came to the old place of residence. A girl played there, whom he asked about her family, to which the girl answered him in a human voice: “Mom knew that you would lose a note with a new address!”

However, let's return from humor to the prose of life. The lively, cognitive mind of a young scientist, like a sponge, absorbed everything new, and, taking into account a wide range of interests, accumulated data from which a kind of generator of ideas was formed, which over time surprised many. There was a period in Wiener's life during which he, as he later put it, "tasted the joy of free labor." During the seven years that followed his doctorate, Norbert was engaged in various sciences at various universities around the world, among which were Cambridge and Göttingen. In addition, he tried to deal with purely “worldly” affairs, for example, journalism, and even tried to get to the front (the First World War was on), however, due to poor eyesight, he was commissioned, and, perhaps due to this physical defect, fate saved the scientist and all his subsequent discoveries from nonexistence. The accumulated life experience, coupled with a non-standard approach, gave an excellent result. His research in the field of mathematics was periodically published in world scientific publications. In parallel, Wiener taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here is what one of his students recalled about how he lectured:

He approached the blackboard, wrote something on it with chalk, and then, muttering under his breath with displeasure: “Wrong, wrong,” he erased. Then he wrote and erased again and again. Two hours later he said: “Now, perhaps, everything!” and, without looking at the audience, ran out of the audience.

Speaking about the phenomenon of Norbert Wiener, it should be noted that in his works he tried to compare what seemed absolutely illogical at the then level of development of science. So, he linked together the principle of machine calculation and the features of the human brain, while rightly assuming that the human brain is a more advanced tool, which, among other things, has such a thing that machines are still inaccessible to this day. It's about motivation.
Actually, the motivation of Wiener himself helped him take the first step towards the most important discovery of his life. Not getting to the front in the First World War, Wiener expressed a desire to be useful during the Second World War, but not at the forefront, but in a research laboratory, where he focused on modeling the trajectories of enemy aircraft, which was based on observations of the behavior of aircraft and further systematization of the collected information. Even then, Wiener noticed that the simulation results have a certain pattern and lend themselves to a certain logic, which, as previously thought, was inherent only to rational beings. Here is what Wiener himself wrote about this in his Cybernetics:

“Already before the war, it became clear that the increasing speed of aircraft overturned the classical methods of fire control and that it was necessary to build in the fire control device all computing devices that provide calculations for the shot ... It is necessary to shoot not directly at the target, but at some point, at which, according to calculations , after some time, the plane and the projectile should meet. Therefore, we must find some method of predicting the future position of the aircraft."

Of course, it was extremely premature to talk about artificial intelligence, but even then the analogies seemed obvious to Wiener. Based on them, he was able to convince a group of scientists at Princeton University, among whom were neurophysiologists, that the human nervous system is analogous to a computer. At the same time, a language familiar to today's programmers was developed - the so-called "binary calculus", on which both lamp calculators of the 40-50s of the last century and the current high-performance processors of personal and stationary computers worked. The key idea of ​​the new concept was the assumption that not only people can transmit and receive information, therefore the line between the human mind and artificial intelligence is not insurmountable.

All this was collected together by Wiener over time, however, chance played a significant role in the publication of Cybernetics, which later became epochal. The scholar was persuaded to write it by a publisher during Wiener's stay in Paris in 1946. This idea was realized two years later, and neither the publisher nor Wiener himself expected how popular the book would become for many years. The success was obvious. We can say that Wiener fulfilled a kind of "order" of that time. The masses were captured by a new idea - the creation of smart machines that can solve all the problems of mankind. Even in the Soviet Union, which for the time being was wary of everything new coming from the West, in 1958, during the Khrushchev thaw, a translation of Cybernetics was published, and Norbert Wiener himself even visited Moscow, where he talked to the advanced figures of Soviet science, met with the editors of the journal "Problems of Philosophy", and also read a report at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum.

However, the genius of our hero was not only in the ability to think creatively and put forward fresh ideas, but also in the ability to critically evaluate what has already been proposed, and, thinking ahead, to see not only the “bright” but also the “dark” sides of his theory. Already at the end of his life, he realized that with all the advantages of the idea of ​​"smart machines", there are certain dangers. It will be clearer to us, living today, if we recall Hollywood films about cyborgs, at the same time, the term “rebellion of machines”, further developed by science fiction writers, came into use. The last book by Norbert Wiener was published a year before the death of the scientist, in 1963, and was called "Joint-Stock Company" God and Golem "(Golem - a revived clay idol from the old tradition of the Prague Jews). In this kind of "scientific testament", the creator of cybernetics warned humanity against the temptation to shift all social and economic issues onto the shoulders of unconditionally smart, but without moral principles and motivation, artificially created devices. “How can we be if we transfer the solution of the most important questions into the hands of an inexorable sorcerer or, if you like, an inexorable cybernetic machine, to which we must ask questions correctly and, so to speak, in advance, without yet fully understanding the essence of the process that produces answers ?.. No, the future leaves little hope for those who expect our new mechanical slaves to create for us a world in which we will be freed from the need to think. They can help us, but on condition that our honor and reason will meet the requirements of the highest morality ... ", - wrote in his last book an outstanding scientist who was many years ahead of the time in which he himself lived.
A few months before his death, Norbert Wiener was awarded the Scientist's Gold Medal, the highest honor for a man of science in America. At the solemn meeting dedicated to this event, President Johnson said: "Your contribution to science is surprisingly versatile, your view has always been completely original, you are an amazing embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist." At these words, Wiener took out a handkerchief and blew his nose feelingly.
Such was the great scientist who, with his discoveries, entered the history of the development of science and technology, as well as our everyday life. Back in those years when cybernetics was more of a theory than a tool, he suggested that machines could not only be a modeling tool, but also serve as a communication tool. After all, everything that we use every day - computers, the Internet, electronic settlement systems, data processing systems on stock exchanges, all this would be impossible without programmable machines and the calculation system proposed at one time. Norbert Wiener, a man whose research became the basis for most modern information technologies. Which to this day, thanks to the automation of exchange operations, in many ways make life easier for traders and investors around the world.
The followers of the great scientist keep up with the times, developing more and more complex automatic decision-making systems, training programs, trading robots, all kinds of indicators and much, much more. And now it is already thought that the hour is not far off when intelligent systems will be able to compare with the human brain. And the warning of the great genius about the lack of emotionality in machines will sink into oblivion.

profit-forex.org

Wiener Norbert

(b. 1894 - d. 1964)

An outstanding American scientist - the founder of cybernetics. World fame to Wiener was brought by his works in the field of mathematical logic and theoretical physics: works on potential theory, harmonic functions, Fourier series and transforms, Tauberian theorems, general harmonic analysis, the theory of random processes, electrical networks and computer technology.

Usually Professor Wiener came to the audience without any notes and lecture notes. At first he blew his nose noisily and energetically, then turned to the blackboard, without even intending to announce the topic, and began to write something with chalk. “Although I usually sat in the front row, it was difficult for me to make out what he was writing,” said the Chinese physicist C. Jen, who studied with Wiener at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology many years later. “Most of the other students didn’t see anything at all.”

In the process of writing with chalk on the blackboard, the lecturer muttered under his breath some words containing an assessment of what was written, for example: "Well, this definition is completely wrong." And then quickly, quickly erased everything that he managed to write, and started again. Finally, the students could hear him say, "So far, this seems to be correct." As soon as everyone took up pens to write something down, when suddenly the professor erased everything again and began to write from the beginning. This was repeated throughout the entire lecture, and when the bell rang, he, without saying goodbye and not even looking at his listeners, left the audience.

With such a penchant for eccentricities, Wiener was quite vain and arrogant. The only thing that saved him from these shortcomings was his amazing irony. Legend has it that such phrases are attributed to him: "A professor is a person who can speak on any topic for about fifty minutes." Or: "The best material model of a cat is another, preferably the same cat"...

The history of scientific inquiry is one of the most exciting and dramatic stories in literature. The main thing in it is not formulas understandable to a narrow circle of specialists, or technical parameters and characteristics, but a general dynamic picture of research, relationships and feelings of people against a historical background, which is inevitably reflected in the principles of motivation and the specific goal of knowledge. Researcher is not a profession, but rather a state of mind and soul. You can be a physicist and still be a layman. Or you can simply explore life in all its diverse manifestations. To be a researcher means to participate in the creation of the information shell of the earth - the noosphere, it means to live, realizing your goals, objectives and the value of the experience gained. Such a researcher was Norbert Wiener, who revolutionized the idea of ​​the role of information and connected it with philosophical and psychological concepts.

The future "father" of cybernetics was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, in the family of a Jewish immigrant, a native of Russia. According to family tradition, the roots of the Wiener family go back to Moses Maimonides from Cordoba, the life physician of Sultan Saladin of Egypt, a famous scientist and theologian. Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, a native of Bialystok, a small town in Belarus, studied in Germany in his youth and spent a rather stormy, adventurous youth. He was a staunch follower of Leo Tolstoy and one of his first translators into English. By the time Norbert was born, he had already become a professor of modern languages ​​at the University of Missouri.

A few years later, the Wiener family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here Leo Wiener taught Slavonic languages ​​and literature at Harvard University. He was distinguished by broad erudition and unconventional views. In particular, he put forward the hypothesis of the African origin of the civilizations of Peru and Mexico, which, however, did not meet with support in scientific circles. But to the greatest extent, the non-standard views of Leo Wiener affected the upbringing of his own son. Under the guidance of his father, Norbert cited Darwin and Dante from memory at the age of seven, graduated from high school at eleven, graduated from Tufts College at fourteen and received the first degree in his life - a bachelor of arts. Wiener described these years in detail in his autobiographical book The Former Child Prodigy.

Thus, the boy was well prepared for a brilliant academic career. Already at the age of eighteen, he received a Ph.D. in mathematical logic from Cornell and Harvard Universities. In 1913, the young Wiener made a trip to Europe, where he visited Cambridge in the UK and Göttingen in Germany, listened to lectures by Bertrand Russell, J. H. Hardy, David Gilbert, but due to the outbreak of the First World War, he had to return to America.

Since childhood, Norbert suffered from monstrous myopia. At times it seemed to him that he was simply born with huge glasses. They were the subject of ridicule from classmates and the annoyance of teachers at school, quarrels with parents, and in the end caused little Wiener to develop a whole “collection of clinical neuroses and mental illnesses.” The glasses were a malevolent reminder of his physical underdevelopment, of a large head on disproportionately small shoulders, because of which peers nicknamed him "egghead", and of his inability to communicate with the opposite sex.

Norbert was constantly in a vicious circle of depressions, repeated every three weeks. In 1915, he tried to go to the front, but did not pass the medical examination due to poor eyesight, and for five years after that he was pursued by a continuous series of failures. The young man tried to teach at the University of Maine, wrote articles for the encyclopedia, worked as an assistant engineer, was engaged in journalism, but every time a new type of activity ended in failure. This continued until 1919, when he finally received, with the help of his father, a position as a mathematics teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served "until the last days of his obscure life," as his biography says.

A few years later, in 1926, great changes took place in the life of the young scientist: after a long period of courtship, he married Margaret Engerman and soon two daughters were born in their family one after another. We must pay tribute to Margaret - she was a reliable friend, nurse and hostess for her very difficult husband in everyday life. They almost never parted, and even during numerous and long trips to Europe and China, the family accompanied the professor. Communication with family members took place in a strange mixture of English and German, and Norbert often used “childish” endings, and respectfully called his wife by her full name Margarita - also not at all in English. The life of the spouses was very closed, protected from external views, but letters were preserved ... Wiener's neuroses began to manifest themselves to a lesser extent, but a phrase from a letter like “the house begins to look empty, and the weather becomes more and more autumnal ...” (New Hampshire, September 7, 1931) speaks volumes...

The father of cybernetics was famous for his extreme forgetfulness. When one day his family moved to a new apartment, his wife put a piece of paper in his wallet on which she wrote down their new address - Margaret perfectly understood that otherwise her husband would not be able to find his way home. However, on the very first day when another great idea occurred to him at work, he reached into his wallet, took out a piece of paper with an address, wrote several formulas on its back, realized that the idea was wrong, and threw the piece into the trash.

In the evening, as if nothing had happened, he went to his former address. When it turned out that no one lived in the old house, he went out into the street in complete confusion ... Suddenly it dawned on him, he went up to a girl who was standing nearby and said: “Sorry, maybe you remember me. I am Professor Viner and my family has recently moved from here. Could you tell me exactly where?” The girl listened to him very carefully and answered: “Yes, dad, mom thought that you would forget it ...”

There are a great many similar jokes about the absent-mindedness of a brilliant scientist. Here are just a few of them. One day, Norbert Wiener ran into his student near the university campus. They greeted each other and, word for word, were carried away by the discussion of one interesting mathematical problem. When Wiener finished explaining how to solve it, he suddenly looked guiltily at the student and asked: “Excuse me, but from which direction did I come here?” The student pointed the direction respectfully. “Yeah. So, I haven’t eaten yet, ”the professor stated sadly ...

Phyllis Block, administrator of the MIT Department of Mathematics, recalled how Wiener liked to visit him in the office and have long conversations with him about all sorts of scientific matters. This went on for several years, until Mr. Block's office moved to another location. And then Wiener came to him again ... introduced himself and met. “He didn’t remember that I was the same person,” Blok laughed, “with whom he often talked. He remembered me only by the room in which I was sitting ... "

In some matters, the scientist was principled and even stubborn. One morning one of his students was driving down the road to New Hampshire and saw an old car with a punctured tire parked on the side of the road. A man sat next to him and looked helplessly at all this household. In the unlucky driver, the student recognized Wiener himself. When the young man stopped and tried to help, the first thing the professor checked was his record and agreed to accept help, since the math record had already been received.

With age, the instability of Norbert's psyche partially disappeared and, according to many contemporaries, was transformed into a defensive reaction, expressed in vanity and arrogance. In fairness, it should be noted that there were more than enough grounds for arrogance. Professor Wiener invented nothing less than a new science - cybernetics. The appearance of the book of the same name in 1948 instantly transformed him "from a hard-working scientist, enjoying a certain authority in his special field, into something like a figure of public importance." Because his cybernetics is more a science about living organisms, man and society than about machines.

In the 20-30s. Wiener again traveled around Europe in order to improve his skills: he studied logic under the guidance of B. Russell in Cambridge, mathematics in Göttingen under D. Gilbert, met N. Bohr, M. Born, J. Hadamard and other famous scientists of the 20th century. Norbert himself spoke of his need for permanent education as follows: “When I stopped studying even for a minute, it seemed to me that I stopped breathing. It was like a dumb instinct."

Those around him treated Wiener as a real "mad professor" - a type that is now dying out, first brilliantly described by Jules Verne. Norbert taught, wrote articles and books. His name became more and more famous in science. The Wiener-Hopf equation appeared in the theory of radiative equilibrium of stars. He lectured at Beijing Tsinghua University and took part in the creation of the first analog computers in America.

With the outbreak of World War II, Wiener was remembered in the Pentagon. No, he was not sent to shoot at enemies with a rifle or control a radar - Norbert, without leaving his native institute department, began to develop a new model for controlling air defense forces. In the process of working on the mathematical apparatus for anti-aircraft fire guidance systems, the scientist was the first to suggest abandoning the practice of firing at individual targets, especially air targets, since in a real battle it was practically useless. It can be said that the concept of "massive fire" adopted in military tactics - rather eerie in its essence, but, from a mathematical point of view, an absolutely correct invention - owes its birth to Wiener. By the way, he himself did not like to talk much about this period of his research activities, since he always considered himself a pacifist.

In the same tense military situation, the first sketches of what eventually became a new science arose. It was then that Norbert first encountered the fact that the machine must perform complex actions to predict the behavior of the target, replacing the gunner, and drew attention to the role of feedback in technology and living organisms. Very productive was his acquaintance with the Mexican physiologist Dr. Arthur Rosenbluth, which took place in 1945-1947, when Wiener worked at the Cardiology Institute in Mexico City.

Comparison of knowledge from the field of medicine, physiology and mathematics allowed Norbert Wiener to formulate a project for a new scientific direction. The idea was the need to create a unified applied science that studies the processes of storage and processing of information, management and control. For this science, Wiener proposed the name "cybernetics", which has received general recognition. Naturally, the specific content of this new field of knowledge is not the creation of Wiener alone. No less important role was played in the formation of cybernetics, for example, by the ideas of Claude Shannon. But Wiener undoubtedly plays a leading role in promoting the importance of cybernetics in the entire system of human knowledge.

The term “cybernetics” itself comes from the Greek “pilot” and was first used by Wiener in the modern sense in 1947. The same Greek root, distorted in Latin spelling, formed the word “governor” in English, and “governor” in Russian.

It is important to note that the full title of Wiener's main book is as follows - "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", and the subsequent program work came out under the title "Human Use of Human Beings, or Cybernetics and Society". Thus, cybernetics is more the science of living organisms, man and society than of machines. A machine is rather a tool and model in general cybernetics, rather than a subject of study, although the emphasis has shifted somewhat lately. The book itself reads like a gripping novel, albeit loaded with terminology and formulae. Wiener could have been a good writer, but he became a brilliant scientist.

After the end of World War II, Wiener, independently of the Soviet mathematician A. N. Kolmogorov, developed the theory of interpolation and extrapolation of stationary random processes. In addition, he developed a theory of their "filtration" for such processes, which received wide technical application.

Numerous congresses, speeches and trips have been added to teaching and hard work on books and articles. Wiener collaborated with the development teams of the first American digital computers. In 1953, he gave a lecture tour in India, and in 1960 he even came to the Soviet Union and gave a lecture on brain waves at the Polytechnic Museum. Returning to the United States, the scientist highly appreciated the level of development of Soviet science: “They lag behind us in equipment - not hopelessly, but a little. They are ahead of us in developing the theory of automation.”

For a scientist, the highest achievement is not another title or award, but the creation of a new scientific direction. And if, even during the life of the author, a new science begins to bear fruit and excites the consciousness of contemporaries, then this is the greatest happiness. Wiener is incredibly lucky. Although, of course, it's not just luck.

The concept of cybernetics was born from the synthesis of many scientific directions. First, as a general approach to the description and analysis of the actions of living organisms and computers or other automata. Secondly, from the observation of analogies between the behavior of communities of living organisms and human society and the possibility of describing them with the help of a general theory of control and information. And finally, from the synthesis of the theory of information transmission and statistical physics, which led Wiener to the most important discovery, linking the amount of information and negative entropy in the system...

In January 1964, Norbert Wiener was awarded the highest award for an American scientist - the National Medal for Scientific Achievement. At a gala dinner at the White House dedicated to this event, US President Lyndon Johnson addressed the professor with the following words: "Your contribution to science is surprisingly universal, your view has always been absolutely original, you are an amazing embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist." It must be said that during the utterance of this phrase, Wiener suddenly began to blow his nose loudly, and then asked the neighbors for a long time what this young gentleman had said.

In a crowd of energetic and cheerful people, he looked lost, as if trying to remember something all the time. His appearance could be pitiful if those around him did not understand that he was truly great. The scientist had several more years of hard work ahead of him, but he had already touched eternity and had even become a part of it. In fact, he was no longer here, among vigorous and healthy men who thought that an important event was taking place in their lives. In fact, the most important events do not take place at official receptions, but in the silence and loneliness of sleepless nights.

The decrepit shell, carrying physical suffering, Wiener no longer needed. A concentrated clot of information has long been ready to break away from the sensitive, but weakened and not accommodating physical carrier and dissolve in an endless ocean of ideas. He was already waiting for his release, with which unlimited possibilities of knowledge and insight were to come. In two months, he will dissolve in the information flows of the Universe, leaving a message to each of those remaining on Earth: “Life is an island of “here-now” in a dying world. The process by which we resist the flow of destruction and decline is called homeostasis. We continue to live in a very specific environment that we carry with us until destruction takes over the process of our own restoration. Then we die."

The brilliant scientist, "father" of cybernetics Norbert Wiener died in Stockholm on March 19, 1964. He was only 69 years old. In his lifetime he wrote at least one great book, Cybernetics, coined over 10 computer terms that are still in use today, taught thousands of students, and published numerous papers on calculus, probability theory, electrical networks, and computer science.

NORBERT KUHINKE Everyone was found, everyone was approved. It remains to find an actor for the role of Professor Hansen, who came to Leningrad to study Dostoevsky. We have always had a problem with foreigners in the cinema. In Soviet cinema, foreigners, as a rule, were played by the Baltics - Latvians,

NORBERT The foreigner was played by the correspondent of the German newspaper Stern, my friend Norbert Kuhinke (he played the Danish professor Hansen in the film Autumn Marathon). A foreigner comes to the stationery store where Nastya works and buys a desktop bust of Karl Marx, which

WIENER NORBERT (born in 1894 - died in 1964) An outstanding scientist - the founder of cybernetics. World fame to Wiener was brought by his works in the field of mathematical logic and theoretical physics: works on potential theory, harmonic functions, series and

Wiener Neustadt A column of Studebakers with a breeze for the first time rushed us to the east, not to the west, but to Leningrad - neither more nor less - 4000 kilometers! But on American cars, our journey was short-lived: after 30 kilometers, the column passed the town of Enns, spread out in a hollow,

Wiener Norbert (born in 1894 - died in 1964) An outstanding American scientist - the founder of cybernetics. World fame to Wiener was brought by his works in the field of mathematical logic and theoretical physics: works on potential theory, harmonic functions, series and

Artificial intelligence Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894, Colombia - March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) The professor entered the auditorium and slowly walked to the pulpit. He took out a handkerchief and began vigorously to clear his nose. He noisily and sharply threw out the air from himself first one, then

Anatoly Ushakov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, prof. cafe Control Systems and Informatics, ITMO University - [email protected]

The historical experience of the development of scientific thought shows that if its bearer is deeply engaged in scientific work, then over time he becomes a natural system analyst, which usually leads to breakthrough scientific results. One example of this in the 20th century. cybernetics, or the science of control and communication in machines and living organisms, appeared as the basis of a materialistic cybernetic philosophy created by an American scientist with Russian roots, Norbert Wiener.

Rice. 1. Norbert Wiener at the blackboard

According to biographers, Norbert Wiener (Fig. 1) is a classic example of a child prodigy. He was born in Columbia (Missouri, USA) on November 26, 1894. His parents emigrated to the USA at the end of the 19th century. My father was a native of the city of Bialystok, Grodno province of the Russian Empire, who later became a professor and head of the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literature at Harvard University, the oldest in the United States.

Rice. 2. Norbert Wiener in his youth

The boy grew up in a large family, where his father deliberately prepared him for a scientific career. As a result, Norbert enters high school at the age of nine, and graduates from college at the age of 14, then continues his education at Harvard and Cornell universities and becomes a Ph.D. in mathematical logic. He independently masters five foreign languages, including Chinese, and plunges headlong into mental activity, moving away from his peers, which is aggravated by acute myopia and natural clumsiness (Fig. 2). Therefore, he was perceived by fellow students as an unbalanced child prodigy, which over the years did not prevent him from becoming a benevolent and warm person in communication.

Rice. 3. Wiener in the MIT auditorium with a model of a tricycle

Norbert continued his education at the best European universities in Cambridge and Göttingen, attending lectures and seminars by Bertrand Russell, Godfrey Hardy, Edmund Landau and David Hilbert. With the outbreak of World War I, he returned to the United States, worked at several universities, in newspaper editorial offices and even at a military factory, was enrolled in the army, from where he was soon dismissed due to myopia. He did not stop doing science and, finally, in 1919 he was accepted as an assistant in the Department of Mathematics (where he later became a professor) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with which his entire subsequent life was connected (Fig. 3). In his book I Am a Mathematician, Wiener wrote that he owes "...the opportunity to MIT to work and think about everything that interests me."

The main works of Wiener in the twenties are connected with statistical mechanics, vector spaces (Banach-Wiener spaces), differential geometry, the problem of the distribution of prime numbers, potential theory, harmonic analysis with applications to problems of electrical engineering and quantum theory. At the same time, Norbert Wiener defined the so-called Wiener process. Somewhat later, he began to collaborate with one of the designers of analog computers Vannevar Bush (Vannevar Bush), which subsequently helped him a lot in his work on digital machines. Wiener proposed the idea of ​​a new harmonic analyzer, which Bush subsequently put into practice.

Rice. 4. Wiener and his wife in India (1955)

In 1926, Wiener married Margaret Engemann of a German family, and they went on their honeymoon to Europe, where Wiener met many prominent European mathematicians. Norbert Wiener was convinced that mental work "wears out a person to the limit", so he must alternate with physical rest. He always took every opportunity to take walks, swam, played various games, enjoyed communicating with non-mathematicians, and worked with his two children (Fig. 4).

With the onset of the Great Depression in the United States, Wiener did not stop his scientific work, educating students, among whom the most famous were the Chinese Yuk-Wing Lee and the Japanese Shikao Ikehara, with whom he subsequently collaborated closely (Fig. 5 ).

Rice. 5. Wiener with his student Yu. V. Lee (left) and colleague at MTIS A. G. Bose (A. G. Bose)

Thanks to the support of G. Hardy and the prominent mathematician Yakov Davidovich Tamarkin, who emigrated from the USSR, Wiener's work became well known in America. He was elected Vice President of the American Mathematical Society. In the prewar years, the joint work with the German mathematician Eberhard Hopf (Wiener-Hopf equations), which is important for forecasting problems, turned out to be especially significant; articles on generalized harmonic analysis; participation in the seminar of the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth (Arturo Rosenblueth), who played an important role in shaping Norbert Wiener's ideas of cybernetics, lecturing at Beijing Tsinghua University.

During World War II, Norbert Wiener worked at the MIT radiation laboratory, where the first anti-aircraft radar systems were created. He studies the problem of aircraft movement during anti-aircraft fire and develops problems of automatic fire control of anti-aircraft artillery, taking into account forecasting, which convinced Wiener of the important role of feedback (which also plays a significant role in the human body), as well as the need to design a control computer. In his opinion, such machines “should consist of electronic tubes, and not of gears or electromechanical relays. This is necessary to ensure a sufficiently rapid action. In addition, they "should use a more economical binary rather than a decimal number system." The machine, Norbert Wiener believed, must be endowed with a certain independence for adjusting its actions and self-learning, it must become “thinking”.

In Wiener's 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. The first outline of the cybernetic method was an article in 1943, and from 1946 he began to work closely with the 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. A Greek word came to mind, similar to the "helmsman" of a ship, which in English sounds like "cybernetics". So Norbert Wiener left him.

Wiener's famous book was published in 1948 by a New York and then by a French publishing house. At this time, he already suffered from cataracts, clouding of the lens of the eye, and could not see well. Hence the numerous errors and misprints in the text of the edition. With the publication of this book, Norbert Wiener, as they say, "woke up famous." The book was immediately translated into many languages, which contributed to the development of intensive research on the problems formulated in this work.

In Russian, the book was published in the USSR only in 1958 and was received rather ambiguously. So, in the book Professor M. A. Bykhovsky recalls that in 1952 one of the prominent Soviet scientists in the field of communications wrote: transfer the laws of radio communication to biological and psychological phenomena, talk about the "capacity" of the human brain, etc. Naturally, all these attempts to give cybernetics a scientific character with the help of terms and concepts borrowed from other areas do not at all make cybernetics a science, it remains a false theory, created by reactionaries from science and philosophizing ignoramuses, who are in captivity of idealism and metaphysics…”.

In turn, at the same time, one of the Soviet authors, who wrote the thickest books on the theory of automatic control, wrote in the preface to his next work: “The attempt of bourgeois scientists to identify man and machine can cause nothing but indignation in the hearts of Soviet people” . Nevertheless, the main part of real Soviet scientists understood everything, continued to conduct scientific work, waiting for better times. They came after the launch of the first Soviet satellite in 1957 and the subsequent publication of the Russian version of Norbert Wiener's book. The word “cybernetics” sounded in the institute classrooms, the disciplines “Fundamentals of Cybernetics”, “Technical Cybernetics”, etc. appeared in the curricula for training engineers in specialties related to automation and remote control. Faculties and departments with “cybernetic” names were organized, The Academy of Sciences of the USSR began to publish the "Cybernetic Collection", the Council on Cybernetics was organized under its presidium, public discussions "Can a machine think?" were held on television.

Rice. 6. Wiener with A. A. Lyapunov (left) and G. M. Frank in Moscow (1960))

Moreover, the contribution of Soviet scientists A. N. Kolmogorov, V. A. Kotelnikov, V. I. Siforov, R. L. Stratonovich, A. Ya. Khinchin to the development of the theory of communication and stochastic processes, as well as A. A. Andronov , V. S. Kulebakin, A. A. Krasovsky, N. N. Krasovsky, A. M. Letov, A. I. Lurie, M. V. Meerova, B. N. Petrova, E. P. Popova, A A. Pervozvansky, L. S. Pontryagin, A. A. Feldbaum, Ya. Z. Tsypkin, V. A. Yakubovich in the development of control theory was noticed by the world scientific community involved in the problems of cybernetics. The first congress of the International Federation for Automatic Control (IFAC) was held precisely in Moscow, in 1960, while A. M. Letov was its president at that time. Norbert Wiener was also invited to this congress, who was met with interest by prominent Soviet scientists and public figures. He was invited with lectures, reports, articles were published, his merits were noted (Fig. 6).
Looking back at that already distant post-war period, one involuntarily wonders what factors then determined the appearance of this “revolutionary book”?

The first factor was time. The bloody World War II ended. Its participants healed the inflicted wounds. Scientific thought entered a peaceful creative channel. Scientists of the world, engaged in the theory and practice of control and communication, were ready for a breakthrough step.

The second factor was the appearance in the scientific community of an individual with unique knowledge, extraordinary capacity for work, breadth of scientific views and interests, experience in applying his knowledge in such areas as the theory of stochastic processes, the theory of forecasting, spectral analysis, communication theory, the theory of computer systems, theory and the practice of controlling artillery firing at moving targets, neurophysiology. Norbert Wiener was such an individual.

The third factor was the state of development of the theory and practice of automatic control achieved by that time. The founders of modern control theory, scientists of the world and Norbert Wiener himself considered the English physicist, the creator of classical electrodynamics D.K. Maxwell, Russian scientists I.A. Vyshnegradsky and A.M. Lyapunov, heat engineer A.B. EJ Routh and A. Hurwitz, electrical circuit specialists HW Bode and HT Nyqvist. A powerful contribution to the tools of control theory was the book of American engineers H. M. James, N. B. Nichols and R. S. Phillips.

The fourth factor was the state of development of stochastic communication theory, information theory and information transmission theory that had been reached by that time. Here a great contribution belongs to Norbert Wiener himself and Claude Shannon, who published in 1948 a fundamental work on information theory and its transmission.

The fifth factor was the rather successful solution by that time of the problem of optimal linear filtering and stochastic forecasting, independently solved by A. N. Kolmogorov and Norbert Wiener. Speaking about this systemic factor, one should touch upon the ethical side of the scientific process, which positively characterizes the creator of cybernetics. In his book, Wiener admitted: “When I wrote my first work on the theory of forecasting, I did not realize that some of the main mathematical ideas of this paper had already been published before me.<…>Kolmogorov not only independently analyzed all the main questions in this area, but was also the first to publish his results.

The main merit of Norbert Wiener, as the author of the famous book, is that he linked the information and the management process into a single content module. There can be no high-quality results of management when low-quality information is used in its organization, everyone who has the fate to manage machines, living organisms or social structures should remember this.

Every talented person is usually multifaceted. This also applies to Norbert Wiener. In addition to scientific works, his pen also includes works of art. The list of his fiction includes about a dozen works, and all of them with good cybernetic overtones, they require a lot of attention from the reader when reading.

In 1964, Norbert Wiener was awarded the highest government award for US scientists, the US National Science Medal. The then President of the United States Lyndon Johnson, presenting the award, said: "Your contribution to science is surprisingly universal, your view has always been absolutely original, you are an amazing embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist." However, Norbert Wiener blew his nose loudly and did not hear what the president said to him. In the same year, on March 18, Norbert Wiener died, a little short of his seventieth birthday.

The name of Norbert Wiener will always be remembered in the scientific community, but he will also be remembered by ordinary citizens with the word “cybernetics”, because whenever it is necessary to strengthen the characterization of any new anthropogenic development, its authors will strive to attribute to it a piece of “cyber”.

In contact with

Literature

1. Viner N. I am a mathematician. M.: Science.
2. Rosenbluelh A., Wiener N., Bigelow J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology //Philosophy of Science. Baltimore, 1943, vol. 10, no 1.
3. Wiener N. Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie & Camb. Mass.: MIT Press. 1948.
4. Wiener N. Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Moscow: Soviet radio. 1958.
5. Bykhovsky M. A. Pioneers of the information age. The history of the development of communication. Moscow: Technosphere. 2006.
6. Theory of Servomechansms /ed. H. M. James, N. B. Nichols, R. S. Phillips. New York, Toronto, London: McGrow-Hill. 1947.
7. Shannon C. E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication // Bell System Technical Journal. 1948.vol. 27.