He was, according to one writer, “the American John von Neumann”—and the exaggeration was almost excusable.
Born in Columbia, Missouri, Norbert Wiener was shaped by a father single-mindedly focused on molding his young son into a genius. Leo Wiener used an extraordinary personal library—and an extraordinary will—to homeschool young Norbert until the age of nine. “I had full liberty to roam in what was the very catholic and miscellaneous library of my father,” Wiener wrote. “At one period or other the scientific interests of my father had covered most of the imaginable subjects of study.”
But Leo’s training was also unsparing, even cruel, and his son was denied a normal childhood. In a passage from Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, his memoir, Wiener recalls his father’s instruction:
He would begin the discussion in an easy, conversational tone. This lasted exactly until I made the first mathematical mistake. Then the gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood. . . . Father was raging, I was weeping, and my mother did her best to defend me, although hers was a losing battle.
At one point, a doctor ordered young Norbert to stop reading; his eyesight could afford no additional strain. Leo decided that what his son could not read, he could memorize. Even a doctor’s concern couldn’t stop Wiener’s determined father: Leo would lecture endlessly, and young Norbert would be expected to capture every word and thought.
In a purely professional sense, the intense regimen of schooling paid dividends. By age eleven, Wiener had already finished high school. Three years after that, at the age of fourteen, he graduated Tufts with a degree in mathematics. From there it was on to Harvard to study zoology, Cornell to study philosophy, and finally, a return to Harvard, where, by seventeen, he earned a PhD in mathematics with a specialty in logic. The climb into the elite echelons of mathematics—and the kind of life his father might have wished for his son—had begun.
But the scars of such a childhood were obvious for all to see. He had been a child coming of age around people many years his senior. And as often happens, he was ridiculed cruelly and mercilessly by the older children; the result was an intense awkwardness that followed him his entire life. It didn’t help that, in appearance, Wiener was easy to ridicule. Bearded, bespectacled, nearsighted, with red-veined skin and a ducklike walk, there was hardly a stereotype of the addle-pated academic that Wiener did not fulfill. “From every angle of vision there was something idiosyncratic about Norbert Wiener,” mused Paul Samuelson. Hans Freudenthal remembered,
In appearance and behaviour, Norbert Wiener was a baroque figure, short, rotund, and myopic, combining these and many qualities in extreme degree. His conversation was a curious mixture of pomposity and wantonness. He was a poor listener. . . . He spoke many languages but was not easy to understand in any of them. He was a famously bad lecturer.
The anecdotes about him fill the pages of other mathematicians’ memoirs, and nearly all are the kind that were first shared behind Wiener’s back. As one story had it, Wiener arrived at what he thought was his home and fumbled with his keys, finding that they would not fit in the lock. He turned to the children playing in the street and asked, “Can you show me where the Wieners live?” A little girl replied, “Follow me, Daddy. Mommy sent me here to point the way to our new house.”
His contributions to mathematics were as broad as they were deep: quantum mechanics, Brownian motion, cybernetics, stochastic processes, harmonic analysis—there was hardly a corner of the mathematical universe that his intellect left untouched. By 1948, he had a CV packed with glittering awards and honors. Wiener’s list of collaborators and contacts was similarly striking: Vannevar Bush, G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Paul Lévy, Kurt Gödel . . . and Claude Shannon.
At MIT, Shannon had taken Wiener’s class in Fourier analysis. A half century later, reflecting on his time in graduate school, Shannon would remember Wiener as “an idol of mine when I was a young student.” Shannon seems not have made a similar impression on Wiener, who wrote in his 1956 memoir, “Shannon and I had relatively little contact during his stay here [at MIT] as a student.” He added, though, that “since then, the two of us have developed along parallel if different directions, and our scientific relations have greatly broadened and deepened.”
Wiener was twenty-two years older than Shannon, so it reveals something about the advanced degree of Shannon’s thinking and the importance of his work that, as early as 1945, Wiener was nervous about which of them would win the race for credit for information theory. Their contest began in earnest in 1946.
As the story goes, the manuscript that formed the outlines of Wiener’s contributions to information theory was nearly lost to humanity. Wiener had entrusted the manuscript to Walter Pitts, a graduate student, who had checked it as baggage for a trip from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Boston. Pitts forgot to retrieve the baggage. Realizing his mistake, he asked two friends to pick up the bag. They either ignored or forgot the request. Only five months later was the manuscript finally tracked down; it had been labeled “unclaimed property” and cast aside in a coatroom.
Wiener was, understandably, blind with rage. “Under these circumstances please consider me as completely dissociated from your future career,” he wrote to Pitts. He complained to one administrator of the “total irresponsibleness of the boys” and to another faculty member that the missing parcel meant that he had “lost priority on some important work.” “One of my competitors, Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company, is coming out with a paper before mine,” he fumed. Wiener wasn’t being needlessly paranoid: Shannon had, by that point, previewed his still-unpublished work at 1947 conferences at Harvard and Columbia. In April 1947, Wiener and Shannon shared the same stage, and both had the opportunity to present early versions of their thoughts. Wiener, in a moment of excessive self-regard, would write to a colleague, “The Bell people are fully accepting my thesis concerning statistics and communications engineering.”
Wiener’s contribution was contained within the wide-ranging book Cybernetics, which had its debut in the same year as Shannon’s two-part paper. If Shannon’s 1948 work was, at least initially, relatively unknown to the wider public, Wiener’s notion of cybernetics—a word he derived from the Greek for “steersman” to encompass “the entire field of control and communications theory, whether in the machine or in the animal”—aroused intense public interest from the moment it was published. A bestseller, the book managed to find its way into the hands of nontechnical readers. The praise was fulsome, the kind of acclaim that most authors work a lifetime to achieve. In the New York Times, the physicist John R. Platt ranked Cybernetics as one of those books that “might be comparable in ultimate importance to, say, Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill.” One of Wiener’s most ardent supporters, Gregory Bateson, called cybernetics “the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the past 2,000 years.”
Wiener must have found words like that especially gratifying in light of his efforts to position cybernetics as the era’s Theory of Everything. Few qualities set Wiener and Shannon apart more than their attitudes toward publicity. “Wiener, in a sense, did a lot to push the idea of cybernetics, which is a somewhat vague idea, and got a lot of worldwide publicity for it,” said Stanford’s Thomas Kailath. “But that wasn’t Shannon’s personality at all. Wiener loved the publicity, and Shannon could not have cared less.”
The popular success of Cybernetics launched a debate over priority within the small clique of mathematicians who wanted to know whether Wiener or Shannon could rightly claim credit for information theory. It also gave rise to a dispute over whether or not Wiener—whose chapter on information as a statistical quantity was admittedly a small section of his book—even knew what information theory meant.
Shannon’s 1948 paper, for its part, gave Wiener credit for influencing his view of the statistical nature of communication. But as more attention was paid to the field, Shannon came to realize that he differed from Wiener in some important respects. For one, Shannon insisted that meaning had nothing to do with the transmission of information, a point he believed was critical; Wiener’s view of information, on the other hand, included meaning. But perhaps the most significant distinction between their efforts is that the analysis of coding, and its power to protect information transmission from noise, is absent from Wiener’s work. Shannon, an engineer by training and inclination, attacked the problem of noise as an engineer might—and his Fundamental Theorem for a Discrete Channel with Noise is the starting point for much of the coding that makes modern information technology possible. This was the key element missing from Wiener’s work and the reason, it seems, that Wiener’s efforts to claim credit for information theory rankled many of Shannon’s followers. As Sergio Verdú, an information theorist of a later era, put it, “in fact, there is no evidence that Wiener ever grasped the notion, at the heart of information theory, of operational meaning lent by a coding theorem.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, though, both Shannon and Wiener were more circumspect. Neither took explicit issue with the other’s understanding, and though they frequently attended the same conferences and wrote in the pages of the same journals, no significant barbs seem to have been traded between them. But by the 1980s, Shannon concluded that Wiener had not fully comprehended his work. “When I talked to Norbert, like in the 1950s and so on, I never got the feeling that he understood what I was talking about.” In another interview, Shannon was even more blunt: “I don’t think Wiener had much to do with information theory. He wasn’t a big influence on my ideas there, though I once took a course from him.” Given Shannon’s habitual lack of interest in these sorts of confrontations, statements like those are telling. But for the most part, he left the struggle for credit to others.
By the standards of the great mathematical feuds—Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton battling over custody of calculus, or Henri Poincaré and Bertrand Russell debating the nature of mathematical reasoning—the rivalry between Shannon and Wiener is, sadly, less spectacular than biographers might prefer. But it still stands as an important moment in Shannon’s story. Shannon gave the impression of the carefree scholar—someone secure enough in his own intellect and reputation to brush aside the opinion of others. Wiener’s opinions and contribution mattered—but not because Shannon worried about who would or wouldn’t receive credit. Debates in his field mattered to him less for their opportunities to assert “ownership” of information theory than for their bearing on the substance of information theory itself. Credit, in the end, counted less than accuracy.