What do you think?
Rate this book
Norbert Wiener-A Life in Cybernetics: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography, available for the first time in one volume. Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics combines for the first time the two volumes of Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography. Published at the height of public enthusiasm for cybernetics—when it was taken up by scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, artists, and musicians— Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956) received attention from both scholarly and mainstream publications, garnering reviews and publicity in outlets that ranged from the New York Times and New York Post to the Virginia Quarterly Review . Norbert Wiener was a mathematician with extraordinarily broad interests. The son of a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, Wiener was reading Dante and Darwin at seven, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, and received a PhD from Harvard at eighteen. He joined MIT's Department of Mathematics in 1919, where he remained until his death in 1964 at sixty-nine. In Ex-Prodigy , Wiener offers an emotionally raw account of being raised as a child prodigy by an overbearing father. In I Am a Mathematician, Wiener describes his research at MIT and how he established the foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics and the theory of feedback systems. This volume makes available the essence of Wiener's life and thought to a new generation of readers.
526 pages, Paperback
Published March 23, 2018
10 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
About the author
Norbert Wiener
128 books177 followersNorbert Wiener was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Wiener is considered the father of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 11, 2018
This autobiography combines two volumes by electrical engineering/computing pioneer Norbert Wiener 'Ex-prodigy: my childhood and youth' and 'I am a mathematician: the later life of a prodigy'... and it is profoundly hard going.
The first volume takes us from Wiener's birth to adulthood, though by this time he had experienced more than most as he went to university aged 11. The descriptions of life and goings on in general are distinctly dull to a modern eye. Occasionally things liven up a little, for example when he describes the suffering of a fellow child-prodigy in later life, or talks about his experience at Cambridge (the real one) with Bertrand Russell.
However, there's a lot that is either of little interest or has lost its context with time. So, for example, we are told that 'I have had no contact with Berle [a contemporary child prodigy at Harvard] since his graduation. He became one of that group of young lawyers and statesmen sponsored by Felix Frankfurter, a group that has been a fertile source of talent…' You have to have been there. No doubt 'that group' meant something to a certain clique once, but they do no longer.
Eventually, after several hundred pages we do get to the bit the Wiener is famous for - cybernetics, which after the Second World War briefly flourished as a kind of cross-disciplinary approach to control systems that had strong overlaps with early computing, but seems to have largely faded away as unnecessary intellectual posturing since. There's no doubt that elements were incorporated into engineering, IT and robotics, but now it is little more than an odd word.
I would only bother with this book if the reader were a historian of science and technology, writing something about Wiener or the rise and fall of cybernetics as a concept. For such an audience it deserves three stars. But (as the pricing suggests) it's not for the rest of us.
The first volume takes us from Wiener's birth to adulthood, though by this time he had experienced more than most as he went to university aged 11. The descriptions of life and goings on in general are distinctly dull to a modern eye. Occasionally things liven up a little, for example when he describes the suffering of a fellow child-prodigy in later life, or talks about his experience at Cambridge (the real one) with Bertrand Russell.
However, there's a lot that is either of little interest or has lost its context with time. So, for example, we are told that 'I have had no contact with Berle [a contemporary child prodigy at Harvard] since his graduation. He became one of that group of young lawyers and statesmen sponsored by Felix Frankfurter, a group that has been a fertile source of talent…' You have to have been there. No doubt 'that group' meant something to a certain clique once, but they do no longer.
Eventually, after several hundred pages we do get to the bit the Wiener is famous for - cybernetics, which after the Second World War briefly flourished as a kind of cross-disciplinary approach to control systems that had strong overlaps with early computing, but seems to have largely faded away as unnecessary intellectual posturing since. There's no doubt that elements were incorporated into engineering, IT and robotics, but now it is little more than an odd word.
I would only bother with this book if the reader were a historian of science and technology, writing something about Wiener or the rise and fall of cybernetics as a concept. For such an audience it deserves three stars. But (as the pricing suggests) it's not for the rest of us.
February 19, 2022
This is an excellent book. Wiener targets the ordinary (but thoughtful) public as his readership.
There is hardly an uninteresting sentence, to say nothing of each paragraph. He writes exceedingly well, beyond what may be seen in almost every contemporary author.
Another review mentions Felix Frankfurter’s “Happy Hot Dogs”. Indeed, the great lawyer is still known for his protégés too. The events of Wiener’s life follow each other sequentially and simply, making the text easily comprehensible.
Clearly this book is not for everyone. Those with an open mind and at least some small amount of curiosity will gain much from reading Norbert Wiener’s incredible account of his life and times.
There is hardly an uninteresting sentence, to say nothing of each paragraph. He writes exceedingly well, beyond what may be seen in almost every contemporary author.
Another review mentions Felix Frankfurter’s “Happy Hot Dogs”. Indeed, the great lawyer is still known for his protégés too. The events of Wiener’s life follow each other sequentially and simply, making the text easily comprehensible.
Clearly this book is not for everyone. Those with an open mind and at least some small amount of curiosity will gain much from reading Norbert Wiener’s incredible account of his life and times.
July 24, 2025
The father of cybernetics speaks! A confession at the start: I knew Norbert Wiener's professor peers at MIT but never met the man himself. Can a genius be manufactured from birth? Yes, but you never know if you will wind up with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or William James Sidis, a classmate of Wiener's at Harvard whose life was shipwrecked by a demanding father and neurotic mother. EX-PRODIGY recounts the first lonely years in an experiment to produce a future scientist; in this case a success. The price to be paid was alienation from and ostracism by other children, countless hours being drilled in algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry by his father, Norbert's mother hardly figures in these pages, and entrance into Harvard, a hot-bed of anti-semitism before World War I, and after. Norbert does not regret his father's disciplinarianism, just the odd-duck son that found a home only in academia. I AM A MATHEMATICIAN, volume two of Wiener's memoirs, is less interesting than the first, but does grant glimpses of the man who birthed a new field in science, cybernetics, the study of systems, machines and organisms, and how they communicate with themselves. The implications for "the human use of human beings" are startling and frightening. Wiener's writings, incidentally, were a key inspiration for Pynchon's hollow world in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Slothtrop being able to detect rocket flights via his erections is the perfect illustration of cybernetics.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews