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Norbert Wiener (1894--1964)

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A very carefully brought up young man. His father, Leo Wiener, was a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, who had pronounced and peculiar views on education, and put them into effect on young Norbert. (Wiener père also had a crackpot theory about the African discovery of American c. 1000 A.D., but that's another story.) The net effect of these practices was that Norbert got his Bachelor's at the age of 14, and his Ph.D. (from --- where else? --- Harvard, in mathematical philosophy) at the age of 18, at which point he headed to Europe to study at Göttingen and Cambridge (under Russell). After various peregrinations he settled at the math department of MIT, where he did lots of good work on algebra and measures, at last finding his true home in stochastic processes and their applications to time series and the foundations of statistical mechanics. In his younger years, he was (by his own account) a barely-ambulatory bundle of neuroses, and insufferable; he improved wi

Norbert Wiener (1894--1964) Notebooks Norbert Wiener (1894--1964) Last update : 21 Jul 2026 12:11 First version : 4 April 1997 or before Largely drafted in the late 1990s A very carefully brought up young man. His father, Leo Wiener, was a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, who had pronounced and peculiar views on education, and put them into effect on young Norbert. (Wiener père also had a crackpot theory about the African discovery of American c. 1000 A.D., but that's another story.) The net effect of these practices was that Norbert got his Bachelor's at the age

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