Comments on the review of 'The Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994'

Citation

Masani, P.R. (1998), "Comments on the review of 'The Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994'", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727haf.001

Comments on the review of 'The Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994'

Comments on the review of The Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994

Keywords Cybernetics, Wiener

Both editors of the Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, 1994, are grateful to Dr Charles Musès for his review (Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 1, 1998). Herewith a few comments to keep the record straight.

Dr Musès' opening sentence: "It took about 100 years to recognize Wiener's genius" would better read "It took the 100 years 1894-1994 for the Wiener birth centenary to arrive", for by the mid-1930s Wiener's stature as a great mathematician was well recognized. He was awarded the Bocher prize of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1933 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences, USA the same year. In the 1960s the AMS nominated him for the National Medal of Science, which he received from President Johnson. After his death, the AMS brought out a special January 1966 issue of the Bulletin of the AMS with the inscription:

dedicated to the memory of Norbert Wiener in recognition of his towering stature in American and world mathematics, his remarkably many-sided genius, and the originality and depth of his pioneering contributions to science.

and containing several invited articles on different aspects of his work. Only in one other case has the AMS taken similar action, to wit, John von Neumann. The AMS also co-sponsored another Wiener Centenary at MIT, and has printed its proceedings in a companion volume, The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997). It would be good if this too could be reviewed in Kybernetes.

Regarding our contributors, the physicist S. Watanabe (or M.S. Watanabe), who wrote in the 1960s and 1970s and commented on the information theoretic papers of Wiener in the Collected Works, Vol. IV, is not to be confused with Professor Shinzo Watanabe of Kyoto, the authority on stochastic analysis on Wiener spaces, who spoke at our meeting.

With regard to the papers on quantum mechanics, Dr Musès is right in pointing out they did not reach into the frontiers of the subject. Unlike the MIT conference, we focused largely on Wiener's own thought. This, as Professor Carlen pointed out in his lecture, sheds fresh light on the hidden parameter problem. Professor Albeverio's paper on "Wiener and Feynman: path integrals and their applications" focuses on a concept, central to string theory, that is not yet understood mathematically.

With regard to fractals, it is worth noting that Wiener's 1920 papers on Brownian curves provided the first known example of a fractal: his curves have topological dimension 1, but Hausdorff dimension 3/2.

Turning to the reprint in Kybernetes of Wiener's paper (not in the Collected Works) based on a lecture by Wiener in Naples, Italy, in 1962, it has to be given the listing [65d] in the Consolidated Wiener Bibliography, since it was first published in 1965. It should be noted that this lecture is a condensation of his earlier paper "My connection with cybernetics" [58f]. The latter is more thorough, and cites the names of Boltzmann, Gibbs, Birkhoff and von Neumann as minds that substantially molded his own. It also covers his work on brain wave encephalography, self-organizing systems, and covers his conversations on economics at Calcutta (with Professor Jan Timbergen, among others).

The word "prehistory" in the title of the new [65d] is misleading, for this prehistory antedates Wiener by centuries, as he was well aware, though not in every detail. Among the earlier pioneers of cybernetics are Odobleja, Claude Bernard, Ampère ("Cybernetique"), not to mention Leibniz, "the Patron Saint of Cybernetics", as Wiener called him. Indeed the origins of the term can be traced back to Homeric poems and it occurs in the writings of Plato. And as Dr Musès reminds us, all algorithms (such as Euclid's) exemplify a feedback principle. If we shift from the cybernetical theory to applications, the prehistory indeed extends to the dawn of history, the trap being a fine example of a teleological mechanism.

This year (1998) is the 50th anniversary of the first printing of Wiener's Cybernetics, and to mark the anniversary, Dr A.V. Jdanko, of the Hebrew University, is organizing a symposium on the "Essence and history of cybernetics" at the Congress in Belgium in August. This offers a good occasion to ask a critical question, unanswered in the literature: Why is it that in none of Wiener's writings is there any mention of von Bertalanffy and of "systems theory", and reciprocally, why is it that papers on systems have no reference to Wiener's papers? How are system studies related to Wiener's cybernetics?

P.R. MasaniDepartment of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA