Volume 3, Number 3 · September 24, 1964
The Importance of Norbert Wiener
By Stephen Toulmin
When Norbert Wiener died a few months ago, one of the most original and significant—yet idiosyncratic—of contemporary scientists disappeared from the intellectual scene. He was entitled to go happy. He had lived fully and stylishly, with a flair not often found in the academic cloister. (But then M.I.T., on which he was based for forty years of his life, is nowadays scarcely a cloister.) He had the legitimate gratification of leaving behind him, not just a world-wide circle of admiring colleagues and pupils, but also a corpus of personal anecdotes motivated by the affection of those who knew him. And finally, he had reason to believe that his major innovations, both in thought and in mathematics, were by now securely established in the foundations of whole new sciences: cybernetics, information-theory, biophysics, and the rest.
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