Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sma 240 Book Paper
Sma 240 Book Paper
SMA 240
Book Paper
13 April 2021
I Am a Mathematician: the Later Life of a Prodigy
This book begins with Norbert Wiener talking about the first volume of his
autobiography which is titled Ex-Prodigy. He says that his first volume “was devoted to my early
education, to my relations with my father, and the unusual experience of being an infant
prodigy”(Wiener 17). The second volume, I Am a Mathematician, starts in 1919 when he first
went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at twenty-four. The first chapter explains how
his father was the most important “of all the influences which operated on me during my
childhood and adolescence”(Wiener 18). Wiener claims that becoming a scholar was a part of his
fathers will but it was also his “internal destiny”(Wiener 18). Wiener was reading the works of
Darwin, Kingsley, Charcoot, Janet, and other writers when he was only seven years old. He
entered high school when he was nine years old. Both his mother and father were Jews but his
mother did not accept it like he and his father did. Wiener says that when she talked about how
she didnt like it, “went far to impress on me that she considered her Jewish origin, and
After Wiener graduated from high school he went onto Tufts College and then went to
Harvard and Cornell for graduate work. He received his bachelor's degree at fourteen years old,
and then earned his doctorate at eighteen from Harvard. He then went on to a fellowship that he
spent at Cambridge, England. His mentor in England was Bertrand Russel, who he studied a lot
of math with. He also followed other courses that Russel had recommended to him which were
courses under the chief G. H. Hardy. Hardy was the man who showed Wiener the Lebesgue
integral for the first time, which Wiener says, “was the lead directly to the main achievements of
my early career”(Wiener 22). The Lebesgue integral is mentioned often in this book and Wiener
explains it in easier terms as “It is easy enough to measure the length of an interval along a line
2
or the area inside a circle or other smooth, closed curve”(Wiener 22). Lebesgue integral is a part
of some of this book's foundation and Wiener says that it “is not an easy conception for the
layman to grasp, … , I shall try to suggest, if not its full complexity, at least its main theme”
(Wiener 21). He then goes on to talk about measuring irregular polygons with the Lebesgue
integral and he says that doing so “is indispensable to the theories of probability and
statistics”(Wiener 23). He says that the two theories were in the middle of math and physics and
that is where his best work came from. He wrote that the Lebesgue integral leads students to
measuring more complex phenomena (Wiener 23). He also started to apply his thinking into
topology, “that strange branch of mathematics dealing with knots and other geometric shapes
whose fundamental relations are not changed even by a thorough kneading of space so long as
nothing is cut and no two remote points of space are joined”(Wiener 26).
In the years 1915 and 1916, Wiener went to Harvard to give lectures. He devoted his
construction”(Wiener 27). He used the work of Alfred North Whitehead for these lectures. A
professor at Harvard, Professor G. D. Birkhoff pointed out some logical difficulties of Wiener's
lectures. Wiener wrote that Birkhoff was the “first important American mathematician to have
had all of his training in America”(Wiener 27). He wrote about the mechanics of the planets.
This was already studied in France by Poincare. After that school year, Wiener tried to enter the
war but was unable to due to poor eyesight. He then became an appointee at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
In the second chapter, Wiener says that he is going to talk about the places that he went to
visit abroad, because they “represent an essential part of both my personal and my scientific
life”(Wiener 44). When the war ended, Wiener wanted to go back to Europe, especially for the
3
coming International Mathematical Congress at Strasbourg. Wiener used his time before the
opening of the Congress to work with Maurice Frechet, a man who Wiener said, he “more than
anyone else who had seen what was implied in the new mathematics of curves rather than of
points”(Wiener 50). Wiener said that he chose this scholar because “the spirit of his work was
closely akin to the work I had tried to do at Columbia on topology”(Wiener 50). Russel and
Whitehead, some mentors mentioned before, had devised the mathematico-logical language for
Principia Mathematica. Principia Mathematica is a book written by Whitehead and Russel that
explains the foundations of mathematics. Not to be confused with Newton's work, Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Much of Frechets work embodied that language which was
The whole chapter is about the International Congress at Strasbourg, but Wiener says that
he cannot talk about that until he explains the Greek geometry and the ideas of
“postulationalism” and “constructionalism”. The Greek geometry was filled with many axioms
and postulates. One axiom that Wiener writes about is “quantities equal to the same quantity
must be equal to each other”(Wiener 51). He then explains the parallel axiom which says “if we
have a plane containing a line l and a point P not on that line, then through P and in that plane
one and only one line can be drawn that will not intersect l. This will, of course, be the line
parallel to l”(Wiener 51). Saccheri, an Italian mathematician, spent a lot of time on the famous
parallel postulate, one we have talked about in class often. He made modifications but could not
perfect it. He also tried to deny the postulate, which then led to many mathematicians that found
non-Euclidean geometry from knowing that they could not deny the parallel postulate.
Wiener explains that according to Russel and Whitehead, “in postulationalism the
numbers are undefined objects which are connected by a set of assumed formal relations'', and
“in the constructionalist treatment of numbers, a unit set is taken as a set of entities all of which
are the same''(Wiener 53). Postulationalism is used in physics as well as math, and it goes along
The third chapter of the book, entitled Years of Consolidation, is from the years 1920-
1925. Wiener had his Brownian motion papers in the works, but had the general organization of
the proofs and theorems to where he could give them to Professor E. B. Wilson at the
Sciences. Wiener also began to gain encouragement from Professor Deguld C. Jackson in the
electrical engineering department. Engineering had two fields, one being power engineering and
the other being communication engineering. They both had a part in the theory of fluctuating
currents and voltages, and Nikola Tesla was the one person who contributed the most to this. “He
converted them to the policy of generating current not in a continuous stream but as a series of
surges back and forth, at the rate of sixty per second”(Wiener 74). This would be the alternating
current and in the early stages there was a “battle royal between the Westinghouse people, who
owned the alternating current inventions, and the General Electric and the Edison people, who
had invested heavily in direct-current engineering”(Wiener 74). New York actually executed
criminals using the alternating current, which of course made people not want to use it. After a
while though, the alternating current was used by both the Westinghouse people and General
Electric. A telephone also has the alternating current idea, but the frequency is much different
because it has a lot to pick up on, which brings us to the vibrating string theory. This theory is
very much in the idea of Pythagoras. Pythagoras knew that the vibrations would produce sound,
5
which is what was needed for the telephone. The sinusoid is the fundamental concept of the
vibrations. The way that Wiener explains it is “we have a drum of smoked paper turned around
and let us further suppose that we have a tuning fork vibrating parallel to the axis of the drum,
and that to the end of this tuning fork is attacked a straw which will make a white mark on the
smoked paper”(Wiener 76). That mark is the sinusoid. Taking the sinusoid one step further and
adding them together with two tuning forks and being able to “observe two or more rates of
oscillation in the same curve at the same time” is harmonic analysis(Wiener 76). Two parts of
this analysis are very similar with the Fourier series. At the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Wiener looked a lot into Heaviside calculus and later found out that Heaviside’s
work “could be translated word for word into the language of this generalized harmonic
analysis”(Wiener 78).
Two years after the International Congress at Strasbourg , Wiener went back to Europe to
get back into mathematics. He began to look into the electromagnetic potential in the interior and
on the boundaries. Wiener wrote, “I was motivated by concepts which belonged to the
the potential of an interior point to the boundary values as a sort of generalized integration rather
than as a limiting process by which the internal potentials should be untied with those at the
boundary point”(Wiener 91). Wiener stayed with his cousin Leon, where he gave a talk to
Gottigen people on his harmonic analysis. This talk, according to Hilbert, was very similar to
quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a part of physics and it originated with the work of
Max Planck(Wiener 97). Wiener puts into layman's terms that “the subject matter of quantum
theory is the study of such light as we find inside of a hot furnace after light and hot matter have
come to equilibrium so that if we look into a cavity with heated walls, such as a blast furnace, the
6
light coming from inside the furnace changes in character as the temperature changes''(Wiener
97).
When Wiener was in Cambridge, Cockcroft and Walton split the atom for the first time.
Once fall came around, Hardy told Wiener that he could have his book on the Fourier integral
accepted by Cambridge. He could also become a quasi-don at Cambridge and give lectures on
his Fourier integral studies. Quasi which means resembles and don which is a teacher at a
university. Wiener wasn't necessarily a teacher, but he did resemble one by giving his lectures.
He then had many colleagues asking him to give lectures at their Universities.
Wiener and his colleague, Paley, worked on attacking the conditions restricting the
Fourier transform of a function vanishing on the half line. Paley didn't really study electrical
engineering, so working on that problem did not help. “It had been known for many years that
there is a certain limitation on the sharpness with which an electric wave filter cuts a frequency
band off, but the physicists and engineers had been quite unaware of the deep mathematical
grounds for these limitations” (Wiener 188). Once Wiener's friend Paley had died, he was
introduced to Arturo Rosenblueth who ran a private seminar on the scientific method at Harvard.
Wiener went to China to give lectures and work with Dr. Lee, his friend that he had met
in China, on their electric-circuit design. Their design was based off of Bush with the analogy-
computing machine but instead of low speed electric circuits they were trying to make it high
speed. Wiener wrote, “What was lacking in our work was a thorough understanding of the
problems of designing an apparatus in which part of the output motion is fed back again to the
beginning of the process as a new input. This sort of apparatus we shall know here and later as a
feedback mechanism”(Wiener 190). He says that the main reason he was there was to give
7
lectures on his harmonic analysis and his work he had written in his book with Paley. Their work
was on the study of electric circuits, which related to the theory of quasi-analytic functions,
which Wiener began to study more when he came to China. He said that “If I were to take any
independent master of the craft, I should pick out 1935, the year of my China trip, as that
point”(Wiener 207).
During World War I, Wiener was an apprentice in ballistic computation. They made
“tables for artillery and small-arms fire which give the range of the weapon and various other
related constants in terms of the angle of elevation of the fan, the powder charge, the weight of
the missile, and so on”(Wiener 227). Doing this work helped Wiener solve his electrical
engineering problems.
Wiener goes on to talk about telephone engineering and how algebra of complex
quantities is very important for it. The Bell Telephone Company had their numerical computer.
Instead of using the Arabic notation for the numbers, it uses the Russian scale which is the binary
scale. The binary scale uses just zero and one. Since they already have the decimal system, the
data that they are initially using is put into the binary scale and once the result is found, it is put
back into the decimal scale. The binary system is used when measuring the thickness, or a gauge.
They have a measure for one inch, two inches, four inches, and eight inches. They use a code to
combine them from one to fifteen using just the four gauges. Writing it in the binary scale would
look as follows: 1, 10, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1111.
While in Mexico, Wiener had come across many mathematicians. Of all of the
mathematicians that he had met, he still writes about the late Professor Birkhoff. Birkhoff, many
years before, thought up an explanation of Einstein's gravitational relativity. This theory “is
8
meant to account for the displacement of light by the attraction of the sun for certain anomalies
in the orbit of Mercury and for the shift of light from the remote corners of the universe toward
the red end of the spectrum”(Wiener 281). Many of the Mexicans at Cambridge were in contact
with Birkhoff at the time and they now teach his studies to their students.
Wiener also worked with Rosenblueth while in Mexico. They attempted “to set up and to
solve the differential equations of impulse flow along a nerve, and in this manner to compute the
passing distribution of electricity which occurs as an impulse goes by”(Wiener 287). The theory
is called the “nerve spike”(Wiener 287). They also looked at impulses through a synapse in the
nervous system.
In 1973, Wiener went to India for the All-India Science Congress. He wanted to go to
India because they were publishing his scientific journals. Wiener also gave lectures at
At the end of the book, Wiener talks about how he is sixty years old but he isn't done
with his work. I found this book very interesting because not only was Wiener talking about his
life, but he was explaining every single thing mathematically and scientifically that he did. I
think reading this book was very helpful and interesting to apply to my life. In my life, I don't
think I focus on math as much as I should. Wiener did the exact opposite. He didn't have a lot of
friends due to being a child prodigy and always focusing on his studies. I believe that if I focused
more on my studies than having a big social life, I would be more successful in my career. After
reading this I think that I am going to apply it to my life and focus more on math and expanding
Works Cited
issuu.com/luisgui/docs/i_am_a_mathematician_-_the_later_li.