Morgan Toal

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

consequently our own Jewishness, a source of shame”(Wiener 20).

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

lectures to “showing how mathematics might be based on the process of logical

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

another reason why Wiener had chosen him.

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.

Whitehead added to the postulationalism by viewing objects as logical constructions instead of

viewing them as just the concepts in the postulates.

 4

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

with the teachings of Einstein and Euclidean geometry.

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

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to The Proceedings of the National Academy of

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

generalized theory of integration of P. J. Daniell…”(Wiener 91) “...I conceived the relation of

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.

He and Arturo worked together on the physiological method in mathematics.

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

specific boundary point in my career as a journeyman in science and as in some degree an

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

Ahmedabad on quantum theory.

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

my studies and less on the distractions.

 9

Works Cited

Wiener, Norbert. “I Am a Mathematician: the Later Life of a Prodigy .” Issuu, 1964,

issuu.com/luisgui/docs/i_am_a_mathematician_-_the_later_li.