Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, c. 2005.

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, c. 2005. BWIE.

Prologue.

• born: 1894.
  
• entered college at age 11;
• PhD from Harvard, age 18;
• apprenticed with renowned European mathematicians;
• 1919: joined the faculty at MIT
• 1920s: worked on the design of the first modern computer
• WWII: helped created the first intelligent automated machines
• his WWII vision --> a new interdisciplinary science of communication, computation, and automatic control, spanning the forefronts of engineering, biology, and social sciences
• his ideas attracted an eclectic group: computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Clause Shannon; anthropologists Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson
• Wiener named his new science "cybernetics" from the Greek word for steersman.

• "feedback": Wiener gave the word its modern meaning; and introduced it into modern parlance;
• first to perceive the essence of the new stuff called "information"
• "electronic brains": melded human nervous system and engineering codes
• led the medical team that created the first bionic arm

• first to warn about generative AI

• sidelined
• as cybernetics superseded by sub-disciplines; and,
• by others who dismissed his moral stands as doomsaying of an aging, eccentric egghead

• d. 1964; died suddenly at age 69 on a trip to Europe.

Prodigy:

• learned the alphabet at age eighteen months, after watching his nursemaid draw the letters in the sand at the beach (near Boston).

• Father was a linguist and professor of languages.

• Father taught at Harvard, an entirely new discipline. Augmented salary by teaching at Radcliffe, up the road ("up the road; LOL; shared a fence line); did etymological work for the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

• Norbert:
• started kindergarten, about age four, Cambridge
• new century: Norbert turned five

Chapter One and Two:

An aside: Drexel University is an incredibly good research university. Private, non-profit. Located in Philadelphia. Ranking: 105 in the US among college and universities.

The US: what a great country.

Harvard has always fascinated me. The chicken or the egg. 

Reading chapter one of the biography of Norbert Wierner again shows just how incredible Harvard is. The students that end up going there; the faculty; the alumnae; the successes. Amazing.

By his first birthday, Norbert was living in Boston.

In 1902 a third child was born in the family, and the family moved to Avon Street, north of Harvard Square. Two doors down lived Professor Maxime Bócher, Harvard's eminent algebraist and geometer, who as widely viewed as the patriarch of Ameerican mathematics. 

In 1903, the family moves to rural Harvard (a city unrelated to Harvard University) so the father could  translate all 24 volumes of Tolstoy for $10,000. He completed that project in two years.

Norbert age nine, enters Ayer public high school as a sophomore. At the end of that first year, he is promoted to the senior class.

Wrote his first philosophical paper at age 10.

1906: last sibling, born. Brother, Frederic, or Fritz.

1906: spring, Norbert graduated from high school.

College: Tufts -- Medford; two miles north of Harvard Square.

Rotogravure, p. 18

• wiki;
• a process; a type of printing used to print pictures, photographs, etc.
• a process, but apparently can be used as a noun for the picture or photograph produced by the process;
• similar to calling a "snapshot" produced by a Polaroid camera, a "polaroid."