Norbert Wiener

[Daniel Bump]

I will attempt to rehabilitate Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who became a
Professor of Mathematics at MIT in 1929.

How did Norbert Wiener feel about the Nazis? 

In the second volume of his autobiography, ``I am a Mathematician,''
published in 1955, Wiener tells of the death of his cousin, the
mathematician Leon Lichtenstein ``as an indirect result of the
coming of Hitler.''

     When I had at last been in contact with Leon Lichtenstein, at Zurich,
     I found him in a depressed mood, owing to the political ground that
     had been gained by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany.
     He knew the Putsch meant trouble, and trouble was not long in
     coming. We read in the papers of the anti-Jewish measures, and
     even as these appeared in the foreign news bulletins Leon sent us
     a pathetic and desparate letter. He had not waited for the Putsch
     to flee Germany for Poland. He wrote me ... to find a job for him
     in the states.

     ... before I could get started we received another communication---I
     think from Lichtenstein's wife---that Leon was dead of heart failure.
     Then I knew that the work of us American mathematicians was cut out
     for us and that we should have to get together and make a systematic
     effort to find jobs and a possibility of life for many a displaced
     scholar.

During the pre-war years, the purging of the German universities
resulted in a great exodus of scholars, including many of Germany's
best minds. Some good mathematicians---Teichmuller, Bieberbach,
Hasse---remained in Germany and were Nazis or collaborators. But
the net effect was the decimation of German mathematics. A
surprisingly candid article in the Notices of the American
Mathematical Society 42 (1995), 1134-1138 by Saunders Mac Lane,
``Mathematics at Gottingen under the Nazis'' is useful reading.

Wiener goes on to detail his efforts to find jobs for refugees. He
``had a hand'' in finding jobs jobs for Szasz, Rademacher, and Polya
and Szego (both of whom came here to Stanford). He goes on to mention
others whom he helped, Emmy Noether, Menger, Weyl and Von Neumann,
who went to Princeton with Einstein and Weyl. Einstein, like Wiener,
made it his job to find positions for the refugees.

     From the beginning of the problem, I tried to get in contact with
     Jewish charities and individual Jewish sources of funds for the
     tremendous task of salvaging as much as possible of the Nazi mess.
     Here I found a mixed reception. The Jewish sources of charity had
     very frequently decided that Jewish displaced scholars were in most
     cases too far from Judaism to be their special responsibility ...
     Furthermore, it was the time of the height of the Zionist movement,
     and the Zionists considered that part of their charitable bounty
     to be spent abroad or on foreigners should go ... to Zionist
     undertakings ...

                   *     *     *     *     *     * 

     While Communism never itself appealed to me, I have not been
     able to feel that right views may not be held on many topics
     by members of a group of which I do not approve. When it was
     the fashion for Communism to condemn Nazism and stand up
     against race prejudice, the fact that these admirable opinions
     were held by Communists was made an excuse for rejecting them
     that only a fool could maintain. That after the defeat of
     Nazism the Communists have become the chief fear of the West
     and that they have behaved with much of the tyranny of the
     aggressors that they have replaced does not change in the
     least the fact that some of the things they stood for in the
     period between the wars belong to the attitudes of every
     decent man. 

Wiener's pre-war work was mostly in the area of harmonic analysis.
The work on cybernetics was almost an afterthought in his career. How
did he get into it? During World War II, Wiener spent his time
devising control systems for anti-aircraft guns, which (together
with perceived parallels in human neurology) led him to cybernetics.

Wiener was interviewed for the Manhattan project, and was asked how
he would approach the problem of separating the Uranium isotopes.
He did not feel that this was a problem that he had any insight into.

     I therefore showed no particular enthusiasm for Urey's problem,
     although I did not say in so many words that I would not work
     on it. Perhaps I was not cleared for the problem, or perhaps
     my lack of enthusiasm itself was considered as a sufficient
     reason for not using me, but that was the last I heard of the
     matter.

So Wiener was out of the loop for the Manhattan project, probably
regarded as a security risk, and he also had nothing to do with the
development of nuclear power. He was a humanitarian who was on the
left side of many issues, such as Spanish Civil War. He opposed the
industrial development model in India. And he was bitterly against
the Nazis.

                           Daniel Bump