Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wienerwas an American mathematician and philosopher. He was professor of mathematics at MIT...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth26 November 1894
CountryUnited States of America
sacrifice past important
Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.
ideas organization world
A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent
running long survival
The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
order community healthy
A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.
science men have-faith
I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.
witty cat models
The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
mathematician
Am I really a good mathematician?
organization giving information
Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
progress possibility restriction
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
ideas matter degrees
Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
past decision machines
The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.
rivers water may
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
answers crosses murphys-law
There are no answers, only cross references
adequate information
To live effectively is to live with adequate information.