Prodigy of probability
Norbert Wiener, the mathematician and former child prodigy who won the National Medal of Science in 1963, figures prominently in MIT lore. After entering Tufts University at 11 and getting his PhD from Harvard at 18, he joined the MIT faculty at 23 and spent much of the next 40 years rambling the Institute’s halls, depositing the ashes of his signature cigar in the chalk trays of his colleagues’ blackboards, volubly holding forth on a bewildering range of topics, and, along the way, helping create the pop-culture archetype of the absent-minded professor.In his lifetime, Wiener was best known for Cybernetics, a book he published in 1948, when he was in his mid-50s, which attempted to unify the study of biological and electromechanical systems through common principles of feedback, communication and control. The book’s title — Wiener’s own coinage, from the Greek for “steersman” — lives on in words like “cyborg”...