FATHER OF AUTOMATION
I AM A MATHEMATICIAN, by Norbert Wiener; Victor Gollancz, English price 21/-. ‘THE autobiographer must tread delicately between the candour which makes a biography worth reading, and objectivity in his account of great events in which he may have had a part. This book takes up the tale where Wiener left it in Ex Prodigy. That brash young man is no more pleasant now than then, even when allowance is made for his lack of a normal childhood. Father, who directed his son’s development, emerges much more than life size. He is the one really memorable portrait in the book. By contrast, wife and daughters are rather shadowy. In this book, we follow Wiener to maturity, and the path is a difficult one. This genius flowered early, as is usual with mathematicians, and such was the (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) power of his mind he touched little that he did not illuminate. He was among the first to recognise that irregularity is in the nature of things, and hence he was in the forefront of the movement towards a mathematics based on imprecise terms. Many branches of science and technology are in his debt and it is probably this portion which will interest the general reader. He was involved in major research in anti-aircraft predictors, radar, television, sociology and biology. He was a willing collaborator in spite of his reputation for insufferable self-sufficiency. But most of us know him best-as the father of automation, and the reader may well be touched by his sincere concern for the social consequences of his work. Anyone genuinely desirous of understanding the bases of automation should read carefully the section on
"feed-back" and then read Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings, both by this author. No autobiography is successful unless one feels one knows the man better because of reading his book. Wiener’s tale is simply told. On occasion the chronicle is small beer. Apart from his father, scarcely another portrait emerges even though he met on equal terms most of the great of our time. The immense capacity to separate the few essentials of a problem, which has served Wiener so well in his scientific work, is here a handicap. The reader will miss the
peripheral view.
J.D.
McD.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 13
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385FATHER OF AUTOMATION New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 13
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