Wiener, Norbert
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1894-1964) US mathematician and author who established the contemporary sense of the word Cybernetics in his highly influential nonfiction work Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948; exp rev 1961). Some of his further speculations in this field appear in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and in God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964); the latter influenced Frank Herbert's Destination: Void (1966), which freely borrows Weiner's terminology.
As W Norbert he published two short sf stories, "The Miracle of the Broom Closet" (April 1952 Technical Engineering News; 1954 F&SF) and "The Brain" (April 1952 Technical Engineering News; in Crossroads in Time, anth 1953, ed Groff Conklin). A novel, The Tempter (1959), deals with the disjunction between scientific research and industrial exploitation of a new Invention, but is not sf. Ex-Prodigy (1953), autobiographical nonfiction looking back to Wiener's early fame as a child prodigy, is an interesting insider study of a kind of intellectual Superman. [JC/DRL]
Norbert Wiener
born Columbia, Missouri: 26 November 1894
died Stockholm, Sweden: 18 March 1964
works (selected)
- The Tempter (New York: Random House, 1959) [hb/]
nonfiction
- Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Paris: Hermann et Cie, 1948) [nonfiction: the first US edition (New York: M.I.T. Press/John Wiley) was offset from sheets of this edition: hb/]
- Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: M.I.T. Press/John Wiley) [nonfiction: exp rev of the above: hb/]
- The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1950) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953) [autobiography: hb/]
- I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956) [autobiography: hb/]
- God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1964) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry