Norbert Wiener earned a Harvard doctorate at 19 and then founded cybernetics
Norbert Wiener finished high school at 11, collected a mathematics degree at 14 and a Harvard PhD at 19. He went on to argue that intelligent behaviour comes down to feedback loops that machines might copy, an early step towards artificial intelligence.
Born in Columbia, Missouri, on November 26, 1894, Wiener was the first child of Jewish immigrants: Leo Wiener, from Lithuania, and Bertha Kahn, from Germany. Leo, a language teacher with a big personal library and real mathematical talent, schooled the boy at home with methods of his own until 1903, patient except when his son gave a wrong answer. At 10 Norbert wrote a paper called The Theory of Ignorance, arguing that all human knowledge is an approximation and nothing can be known for certain.
He left Ayer High School in 1906, entered Tufts, and took his degree in 1909. Graduate study in zoology at Harvard gave way to philosophy at Cornell, then a return to Harvard, where a dissertation on mathematical logic won him a doctorate in June 1913. In Europe he learned from Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and David Hilbert at Göttingen. Though later a committed pacifist, he tried repeatedly to serve in the First World War; turned down as an officer and then for poor eyesight, he worked on ballistics at Aberdeen Proving Ground before finally enlisting as a private.
Harvard never gave him a permanent post, which he blamed largely on anti-Semitism and on the mathematician G. D. Birkhoff. Melbourne rejected him too, so he went to MIT as an instructor and stayed for the rest of his career, becoming a professor. His research on random noise processes and Brownian motion fed into electronics, communications and control systems, and he is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, the study of communication in animals and machines. Its influence reached John von Neumann, Claude Shannon and Margaret Mead.
MIT legend made him the archetypal absent-minded professor. One story has him arriving at an empty house and asking a local girl where the family had gone; she explained they had moved that day and that Mommy had sent her to fetch Daddy. His daughter said he never forgot his own children, but the rest was fairly close to the truth. He died on March 18, 1964.
Source: Norbert Wiener
