mathematician, founder of cybernetics (USA). The most important works: "Behavior, purposefulness and teleology" (1947, co-authored with A. Rosenbluth and J. Bigelow); "Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine" (1948, had a decisive influence on the development of world science); "The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society" (1950); "My attitude to cybernetics. Its past and future" (1958); "Joint-Stock Company God and Golem" (1963, Russian translation "Creator and Robot"). Autobiographical books: "Former child prodigy. My childhood and youth" (1953) and "I am a mathematician" (1956). The novel "The Tempter" (1963). National Medal of Science for Distinguished Service in Mathematics, Engineering, and Biosciences (highest distinction for US scientists, 1963). V. was born in the family of an immigrant Leo V., a Jewish native of the city of Bialystok (Russia), who abandoned traditional Judaism, a follower of the teachings and translator of the works of L. Tolstoy into English, professor of modern languages at the University of Missouri, professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). According to the oral tradition of the V. family, their family went back to the Jewish scientist and theologian Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the life physician of Sultan Salah ad-Din of Egypt. V.'s early education was led by his father according to his own program. At the age of 7 V. read Darwin and Dante, at 11 he graduated from high school; He received his higher mathematical education and his first Bachelor of Arts degree from Taft College (1908). Then V. studied at graduate school at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy with J. Santayana and Royce, Master of Arts (1912). PhD (in mathematical logic) from Harvard University (1913). In 1913-1915, with the support of Harvard University, he continued his education at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities. At the University of Cambridge, V. studied number theory with J.H. Hardy and mathematical logic with Russell, who "... impressed me with a very reasonable idea that a person who was going to specialize in mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics could know something and from mathematics itself..." (V.). At the University of Göttingen, V. was a student of philosophy at Husserl and a course of mathematics at Hilbert. In connection with the First World War, he returned to the United States (1915), where he completed his education at Columbia University (New York), after which he became an assistant at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Teacher of mathematics and mathematical logic at a number of US universities (1915-1917). Journalist (1917-1919). Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1919 until his death; full professor of mathematics at MIT since 1932. Early work V. led in the field of foundations of mathematics. The works of the late 1920s belong to the field of theoretical physics: the theory of relativity and quantum theory. As a mathematician V. achieved the greatest results in probability theory (stationary random processes) and analysis (potential theory, harmonic and almost periodic functions, Tauberian theorems, series and Fourier transforms). In the field of probability theory, V. almost completely studied an important class of stationary random processes (later named after him), built (regardless of the works of A.N. Kolmogorov) by the 1940s the theory of interpolation, extrapolation, filtering of stationary random processes, Brownian motion. In 1942 W. approached the general statistical theory of information: the results were published in the monograph Interpolation, Extrapolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series (1949), later published under the title Time Series. Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 1935-1936. He maintained intensive personal contacts with the world-famous scientists J. Hadamard, M. Frechet, J. Bernal, N. Bor, M. Born, J. Haldane and others. 1937). While working in China, V. considered an important stage, the beginning of the maturity of a world-class scientist: "My work began to bear fruit - I managed not only to publish a number of significant independent works, but also to develop a certain concept, which in science could no longer be ignored." The development of this concept directly led V. to the creation of cybernetics. Back in the early 1930s, V. became close to A. Rosenbluth, an employee of the laboratory of physiology of W. B. Kennon from Harvard Medical School, the organizer of a methodological seminar that brought together representatives of various sciences. This made it easier for V. familiarity with the problems of biology and medicine, strengthened him in the idea of the need for a broad synthetic approach to contemporary science. The use of the latest technical means during the Second World War confronted the opposing sides with the need to solve serious technical problems (mainly in the field of air defense, communications, cryptology, etc.). The main attention was paid to solving the problems of automatic control, automatic communication, electrical networks and computer technology. V., as an outstanding mathematician, was involved in work in this area, which resulted in the beginning of the study of deep analogies between the processes occurring in living organisms and in electronic (electrical) systems, the impetus for the emergence of cybernetics. In 1945-1947, V. wrote the book "Cybernetics", working at the National Cardiology Institute of Mexico (Mexico City) with A. Rosenbluth, co-author of cybernetics - the science of managing, receiving, transmitting and transforming information in systems of any nature (technical, biological, social, economic, administrative, etc.). V., who in his studies were close to the traditions of the old schools of scientific universalism G. Leibniz and J. Buffon, paid serious attention to the problems of methodology and philosophy of science, striving for the broadest synthesis of individual scientific disciplines. Mathematics (its basic specialization) for V. was one and closely connected with natural science, and therefore he opposed its sharp division into pure and applied, since: "... the highest purpose of mathematics is precisely to find the hidden order in the chaos that surrounds us ... Nature, in the broad sense of the word, can and should serve not only as a source of problems solved in my research, but also suggest an apparatus suitable for solving them ..." ("I am a mathematician "). His philosophical views V. outlined in the books "Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society" and "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine". In philosophical terms, V. were very close to the ideas of the physicists of the Copenhagen school M. Born and N. Bohr, who declared independence from "professional metaphysicians" in their special "realistic" worldview outside of idealism and materialism. Considering that "... the dominance of matter characterizes a certain stage of physics of the 19th century to a much greater extent than modernity. Now "materialism" is just something like a free synonym for "mechanism". In essence, the whole dispute between mechanists and vitalists can be put aside poorly formulated questions in the archive ... "(" Cybernetics "), V. at the same time writes that idealism "... dissolves all things in the mind ..." (" Former child prodigy "). V. also experienced a significant influence of positivism. Based on the ideas of the Copenhagen school, V. tried to connect cybernetics with statistical mechanics in the stochastic (probabilistic) concept of the universe. At the same time, according to V. himself, his rapprochement with existentialism was influenced by his pessimistic interpretation of the concept of "chance". In the book ("I am a mathematician"), V. writes: "... We are swimming upstream, struggling with a huge stream of disorganization, which, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, tends to reduce everything to thermal death - universal balance and sameness. That, what Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs called heat death in their physical writings found its counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who argued that we live in a world of chaotic morality.In this world, our first duty is to arrange arbitrary islands of order and system.. ." (V.'s desire to compare the teachings of Bergson and Freud to the methods of statistical physics is also known). However, thermal death is still conceived by V. here as a limiting state, achievable only in eternity, therefore, in the future, ordering fluctuations are likely: "... In a world where entropy as a whole tends to increase, there are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy, and the presence of these islands makes it possible for some of us to prove the existence of progress ... "(" Cybernetics and Society "). The mechanism for the emergence of regions of entropy reduction "...consists in the natural selection of stable forms...here physics goes directly into cybernetics..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). According to V., "... ultimately striving for the most probable, the stochastic Universe does not know a single predetermined path, and this allows order to fight against chaos until the time ... Man influences the course of events in his favor, extinguishing the entropy extracted from the environment negative entropy - information... Cognition is a part of life, moreover, its very essence. To live effectively means to live with correct information..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). With all this, the gains of knowledge are still temporary. V. never "... imagined logic, knowledge and all mental activity as a complete closed picture; I could understand these phenomena as a process by which a person organizes his life in such a way that it proceeds in accordance with the external environment. Important a battle for knowledge, not victory.After every victory, i.e., behind everything that reaches its climax, the twilight of the gods immediately sets in, in which the very concept of victory dissolves at the very moment when
it will be achieved ... "("I am a mathematician"). V. called W.J. Gibbs (USA) the founder of stochastic natural science, considering himself a successor to his direction. In general, V.'s views can be interpreted as casualistic with the influence of relativism and agnosticism According to V., the limited human capabilities of cognition of the stochastic Universe are due to the stochastic nature of the connections between a person and his environment, since in "... the probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and judgments related to a certain real Universe as a whole , but instead we pose questions, the answers to which can be found in the assumption of a huge number of such worlds ... "(" Cybernetics and Society "). As for probabilities, their very existence for V. is nothing more than a hypothesis, due to the fact that that "...no amount of purely objective and isolated observation can show that probability is a sound idea. In other words, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established by induction. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something in accordance with which we can act than what we can prove ... "(" Cybernetics and society "). V.'s social ideals were as follows: speaking out for society, based on "...human values other than buying and selling...", for "...healthy democracy and the brotherhood of peoples...", V. pinned his hopes on "...the level of public consciousness..." , on "... the germination of grains of goodness ...", fluctuated between a negative attitude towards the contemporary capitalist society and an orientation towards "... the social responsibility of business circles ..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). Roman V. " Tempter "is a variant of reading the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, in which the hero of the novel, a talented scientist, becomes a victim of self-interest of business figures. In religious matters, V. considered himself "... a skeptic standing outside of religions ..." ("Former child prodigy") In the book "Creator and Robot" V., drawing an analogy between God and a cybernetician, tra regards God as a limiting concept (such as infinity in mathematics). V., considering the culture of the West morally and intellectually weakening, pinned hope on the culture of the East. V. wrote that "... the superiority of European culture over the great culture of the East - only a temporary episode in the history of mankind ...". V. even proposed to J. Neru a plan for the development of India's industry through cybernetic automatic factories in order to avoid, as he wrote, ". ..devastating proletarianization..." ("I am a mathematician"). (See Cybernetics.)
Great Definition
Incomplete definition ↓
As a boy, I borrowed a maroon book from one of my mother's wise acquaintances, on the cover of which the mysterious word "Cybernetics" was emblazoned. The book settled on my personal shelves, which owned all the free space of a ten-meter room, and largely determined the fate of its owner. This happened by no means due to the consonance of Wiener's ideas with my invented world. From the first to the last page, I read "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine" only when I was preparing the introductory part for my diploma, the title of which I will hardly reproduce (something about using the theory of pattern recognition when building a mathematical model of X-ray radiometric express analysis of non-ferrous metal ores). So what made me treat this book with touching tenderness? Ironically, the reason for this was the story of another wonderful book. My father (who, after his divorce from my mother, dragged away the whole library he lovingly collected) considered it his duty to closely monitor my mental development. My list included Lem, Strugatsky, Sheckley, Bradbury and others like them. But then one day he solemnly handed me a book by a certain Robin George Collingwood, an English philosopher and cultural historian. I habitually opened the book in the middle and got bored. This uncle was too tough for me. But since I was already lying on the couch with a book in my hands (and did not want to get up), I decided to at least overcome the preface written by the author himself. The story told there struck me so much that I suddenly painfully wanted to become at least a little like little Robin. And it happened like this: a strict father ordered the servants to lock the delinquent future Lord Collingwood in the library, the prankster took advantage of the situation and climbed the stairs to the topmost bookshelf, throwing off a whole heap of priceless folios from it. Well, who among us in childhood did not hide in the closet? Sitting comfortably on the bookshelf, the boy was about to put a thick leather-bound volume under his head. And then his eyes fell on the title. He could not read it, the letters were unfamiliar. Leafing through the book, Robin made sure that the text was printed in the same unknown language. The book beckoned and, putting it under his head, the boy fell asleep with the thought that he would devote his whole life to studying mysterious texts. And so it happened. That book was Plato's Dialogues. Mine is Wiener's Cybernetics. I haven't read it yet. But I already thought about it. Strange sensations. Strange books.
Our hero, Norbert Wiener, completed his first fundamental work (the aforementioned "Cybernetics") at the age of 54. Such an excerpt wonderfully characterizes a great scientist who is always doubting everything. I think the reader will be able to appreciate the degree of "suffering" of the materials presented in Wiener's most famous book, if he remembers the first chapters of the biography of the "father of cybernetics".
Norbert's parents were from the small town of Bialystok in Belarus. They were reputed to be solid and reasonable people, had a fairly high social status and considerable wealth. The Wiener family did not wait for either the pogroms, or the First World War, or the fratricidal Civil War. At the end of the nineteenth century, they left the still outwardly calm and quite prosperous Russia, and moved to the States. The head of the family, Leo Wiener, soon got a job as a professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard University. Later, he would become famous as a leading expert on linguistic interference, and his attention would shift to Africans and Indians, but in the early years of emigration, among his highbrow colleagues, he became widely known as the translator into English of Alexander Radishchev's immortal exposé work "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" and father charming toddler.
The child, named in the American manner Norbert, was born on November 26, 1894. This fact was recorded by the federal authorities in the Missouri District of Columbia Life Book. I don't know if he was circumcised, so I trust you to judge whether Wiener Jr. is entitled to a chapter in Famous Jews. (However, the former major of the Soviet tank troops, Pasha Andreev, circumcised for the sake of fun during the fighting in Afghanistan by his friend, military surgeon Dvuzhilny, assured me that "all Americans
the ends of their children are circumcised in childhood").
Leo from the first days began to nervously fuss around his son, meticulously observing his reflexes, in the natural desire for any father to discover obvious signs of genius in his child. Practitioner Professor Viner attacked an innocent child with all the steadfastness of the latest teaching and educational methods. The boy learned to speak and think simultaneously in several languages, and began to read almost before he mastered the difficult art of moving on his own two feet. At the age of 4, he was already admitted to the parental library, and at the age of 7 he wrote his first scientific treatise on Darwinism. Thus, I remind you that between the first scientific work and the first public work there were almost half a century of painful reflections. However, the interests of the young genius were not limited to questions of biology and the origin of the human race. He quoted Dante's terzas and the pseudoscientific monologues of the fabulous Paganel with equal enthusiasm. He dreamed of the depths of hell and the mysterious lands inhabited by unknown creatures at an age when normal children dream of sweet pink cockerels and the first letters of the alphabet. Home education was not in vain.
Norbert never really went to high school. But at the age of 11, he entered the prestigious Taft College, which he graduated with honors in three years. Sexually mature students looked at the 14-year-old bachelor with bewilderment, bordering on the desire to immediately punch him in the neck. But the nimble, chubby bespectacled man habitually pressed his disproportionately large head into his narrow shoulders and almost always managed to elude his ill-wishers. Young Norbert sometimes got it in verbal skirmishes. The proud Jewish surname Wiener (in German wiener - crown) is not so easy to wear along the corridors of an American educational institution as a teenager. The straightforward Yankees at all times were not very versed in subtle linguistic nuances, therefore, for brevity, they called the German smoked sausages "wienerwurst" with the word "wiener", and subsequently gave this word a completely indecent meaning. (If you have ever heard the pitiful "Mammy, my wee-wee want pee-pee" from an American of kindergarten age, then you will understand what meaning I am talking about.) However, to Norbert (despite the merits of dad in the field of literature) did not care about the subtleties of language. He was quietly furious and promised to eventually recoup on the descendants of insidious offenders.
So, in fun, days passed imperceptibly, and by the age of 18, Norbert Wiener was already listed as a Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Cornell and Harvard universities. At the age of nineteen, Dr. Wiener was invited to the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "where he served until the last days of his obscure life." One way or something like this one could finish a biographical article about the father of modern cybernetics. And everything that has been said would be true, if not for one hitch: if the mathematician Wiener managed to hide from humanity, then he hid in the shadow of his own glory.
The father developed in Norbert a morbid passion for learning. “When I stopped studying even for a minute, it seemed to me that I stopped breathing. It was akin to a stupid instinct,” Wiener recalled at an older age. Soon the professor's assistant N. Wiener managed to convince the cathedral authorities to send him to Europe for "advanced training". And he studied again. In Cambridge - with the great Russell and the eccentric Hardy, in Göttingen - with the meticulous Gilbert. To say "and was a favorite student" is not enough, but to speak of participation in the creation of modern mathematics is both banal and unjustified at the same time. Norbert grew up, for the first time in his life he gained independence. Having turned out to be inaccessible to the caring parental hand, he wanted to overnight catch up on what he had lost during the years of his "gifted childhood" (his own expression). No, he didn't go all out. Not at all. Our young man was too shy and clumsy for romantic adventures. Wiener allowed himself a much greater sin. He doubted his mathematical vocation. The future "father of cybernetics" had to try his hand at the role of a journalist near the university newspaper, test himself in the teaching field, serve as an engineer at a factory for a couple of months. At the same time, he simultaneously attended literary circles (where in those
many people from Russia were spinning for years). However, pretty soon Norbert became disillusioned with attempts to change his fate and returned to the States, to the walls of his native department. There was a war going on in Europe, it made it difficult to concentrate.
Once Norbert Wiener ran into one of his students near the university campus. They exchanged a couple of welcome phrases and soon got carried away discussing pressing mathematical problems. At the end of the conversation, Wiener looked guiltily at the student and asked: "Excuse me, but from which side did I come here?" The student pointed the direction respectfully. "Yeah. So I haven't eaten yet," the professor stated sadly. Not exactly a joke.
There, at MIT, Wiener managed to "productively wait out the troubled times" between the First and Second World Wars. While the whole of America either trembled in hungry despair, or consoled itself with great-power euphoria, the "pure scientist" did his job. He managed to become a professor at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, Göttingen and other universities, received a chair at the Massachusetts Institute in his own undivided ownership, wrote hundreds of articles on probability theory and statistics, on Fourier series and integrals, on potential theory and number theory, on generalized harmonic analysis, and so on and so forth. These were the happiest years of his life. He was young, full of creative plans, talented and completely unknown to anyone. His writings were purely academic and might astonish colleagues, but in no way alarmed the rest of humanity.
Everything changed when Hitler came to power in Germany. Wiener was not such a hermit; social problems worried him not only from the point of view of mathematical modeling. The waves of Jewish emigrants who poured across the ocean into the New World in the 1930s brought with them the musty smell of death. America was drawn into a new war, to which the professor wished to be called. No, he did not go on the attack and did not even operate the radar (like Doug Engelbart), he was not given any army rank. Norbert Wiener did not leave the limits of his own department. The emphasis has just shifted. Now the main attention of the scientist was given to the construction of deterministic stochastic models for the organization and management of the American air defense forces. Wiener was the first to suggest abandoning the practice of firing at individual targets (which had an extremely low efficiency in a real battle between a battery of anti-aircraft installations against a squadron of enemy aircraft). He developed a new effective probabilistic model for controlling air defense forces. The task was as difficult as it was interesting. And it is absolutely impossible, at first glance, without the use of today's computer technology. Indeed, what is a song without an accordion, what is a rocket without homing?
But the war is over. And the military term "homing" gave way to the peaceful word "self-learning". With the usual excitement, Wiener now shared with colleagues observations from the life of Mickey Mouse. Today this story has become a textbook and it is called like this: "A mouse in a labyrinth." Indeed, if a rodent (accustomed to tangled burrows) enters a new labyrinth for the first time, it behaves as follows: it poke into all the holes, remembering the wrong moves and not repeating them. So, sooner or later, he gets to the goal (a piece of cheese, a desired female, a door to another world, etc.). If he is released into this labyrinth again, he will unmistakably go all the way from point A to point B. Conclusion? A mouse in a maze is an example of a self-learning system. It remained to create (or at least describe in detail) some kind of artificial mouse. For which Wiener took up with his characteristic ardor.
Professor Norbert Wiener usually began his lectures by taking off his glasses from his nose, taking out a handkerchief from his pocket and blowing his nose noisily, then he searched the space for a couple of minutes in search of chalk, found it, turned his back to the audience and without preamble wrote something on the blackboard. Then he muttered something like "wrong, everything is wrong", erased and wrote down again. All this could be repeated until the end of the lecture. A couple of minutes before the call, Wiener said: "Here! Here we could put an end to today!" He took out a handkerchief, blew his nose and, without looking at the audience, left the lecture hall. From the memoirs of the famous physicist S.K. Chen.
Wiener's "Cybernetics" was published in 1948. She was almost immediately
recognized by the world scientific community as "a work out of the ordinary:", translated into dozens of languages, but the understanding of the greatness of this creation came much later. Reading "Cybernetics" is difficult (however, this is how I started this text). The reader needs to be well versed in mathematical logic, and in neurophysiology, and in statistics, and in engineering, and in philosophy, in order to appreciate it. Fundamental work? So what? I know a lot of good programmers who haven't even held "Cybernetics" in their hands. More precisely, I know very few programmers who held it in their hands. Read, so generally units! What is "cybernetics"? Plato (seemingly accidentally mentioned above) argued that a word similar to this, the Phoenicians denoted the most complex science of their time, the science of navigation. If Plato and Wiener could meet not only on a bookshelf, the ancient Greek would change his mind (the truth is more precious!). According to Wiener, cybernetics is the science of control, communications and information processing in technology, living organisms and human society. The science that allows you to create artificial intelligence. The science that allows you to control artificial intelligence.
In the special depository one could get Wiener's secret report to the US Government on the theory of extrapolation of random sequences and processes. The report was published in a bright yellow cover and among mathematicians who had access to this material and experienced considerable difficulty in reading this report, was called the "yellow danger". From the memoirs of professor of Moscow State University V.Tikhomirov.
Wiener considered it obvious that many conceptual schemes that determine the behavior of living organisms in solving specific problems are practically identical to schemes that characterize control processes in complex technical systems. Moreover, he convincingly argued that social management models and management models in the economy can be analyzed on the basis of the same general provisions that are developed in the field of management of systems created by people. These ideas were developed in another "popular-mathematical" work, known in Russian translation as "Cybernetics and Society". And although Wiener quite sincerely considered the social sciences "the worst area for confirming the laws of cybernetics," the creators of the communist idea locked his works in a special depository for a long time, fearing precisely the "socio-political consequences" of putting his ideas into practice. The situation improved somewhat in the 1960s, when, sitting in the shadow of the banner "Cybernetics in the service of communism!", the enlightened homo-Sovieticus, marveling at his own boundless courage, read the Strugatskys' "Monday". As for the rest of the world, Wiener was revered as a great contemporary, they showered him with awards, in every possible way demanded from him complicity in the development of cybernetic ideas. Together with Claude Shannon, Wiener laid the foundations of modern information theory (by the way, the word "bit" is also their invention). Entire academies could bask in the glory of the "father of cybernetics". And then, as it seemed to many, "the old man is crazy." The most authoritative Wiener publishes two works in a row, the novel "The Tempter" and the philosophical treatise "The Creator and the Golem", in which he unambiguously makes it clear to mankind that he is not only frightened by the elements of "inhuman thought" awakened by him, but is also ready to offer his services to destroy the devil's creation.
A couple of months before his death, Norbert Wiener was awarded the Gold Scientist 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 universal, your view has always been absolutely 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 with feeling.
He died quietly in the spring of 1964 in Stockholm. The Golem outlived its Creator.
I realized that science is a calling and service, not a service. I have learned to hate every kind of deceit and intellectual pretense and take pride in my lack of timidity in the face of any task that I have a chance of solving. All this is worth the suffering that one has to pay, but from someone who does not have sufficient physical and moral strength, I would not demand this payment. The weak cannot pay it, for it will kill him. Norbert Wiener.
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 friendly 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 owed "...the opportunity to MIT to work and think about everything that interests me."
Wiener's main work in the twenties was related to 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 later 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 go for walks, swim, play various games, communicate with non-mathematicians with pleasure, and study 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”.
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Literature
- Viner N. I am a mathematician. M.: Science.
- Rosenbluelh A., Wiener N., Bigelow J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology //Philosophy of Science. Baltimore, 1943, vol. 10, no 1.
- Wiener N. Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie & Camb. Mass.: MIT Press. 1948.
- Wiener N. Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Moscow: Soviet radio. 1958.
- Bykhovsky M. A. Pioneers of the information age. The history of the development of communication. Moscow: Technosphere. 2006.
- Theory of Servomechansms /ed. H. M. James, N. B. Nichols, R. S. Phillips. New York, Toronto, London: McGrow-Hill. 1947.
- Shannon C. E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication // Bell System Technical Journal. 1948.vol. 27.
American mathematician, one of the founders of cybernetics (the first edition of the book of the same name took place in 1948, although the term itself "cybernetics" used before it Plato And Ampere).
Norbert was educated at home by his father Leo Viner- follower of ideas and translator L.N. Tolstoy, as well as , .
At the age of three, Norbert could read and write, and at the age of seven he could read Darwin And Dante. At the age of eleven, he graduated from high school, at the age of 17 he became a master of arts, at 18 - a doctor of philosophy in the specialty "mathematical logic".
Norbert Wiener, working “... with engineers, doctors, biologists, he realized the deep inner unity of many tasks that arise in different fields. It turned out that many of the studied processes or designed systems are described by the same mathematical models and suggest similar ways of solving the tasks. Moreover, in many cases, the controlled or studied system can be considered as a “black box”, which, in response to these influences, gives quite definite reactions, regardless of what is inside this “box”. Moving along the path laid out N. Wiener, managed to introduce the concept of feedback, which is very important both for control theory and for other areas of knowledge, to build conceptual and mathematical models.
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.
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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" .
