Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth

by Norbert Wiener

Book Overview

These two volumes ( I Am Mathematician and Ex-Prodigy ) comprise Norbert Wiener's autobiography. Sometimes with humor and sometimes with sadness, they render an account, without sentiment, of the life... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262730081
• ISBN13: 9780262730082
• Release Date: August 1964
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Ex-prodigy. My Childhood andYouth

It's an excellent book telling about how it's to grow up as a prodigy and thereby living a life betwwen older in the schools and at the same age when out playing. And besides allso becaurse the books is about living 100 years ago telling about how it was then, and the meating with many famous science person living then. Allso telling about other prodigys problems.

A mathematical John Stuart Mill

This is the story of the childhood and youth of a genius. Norbert Wiener who would go on to become an important mathematician and one of the principal developers of communication theory, and his own specific discipline 'cybernetics' tells here the story of his most unusual childhood and youth. At the center is his relation to his father Leo Wiener who was a Professor of Slavic Languages, and an extraordinarily ambitious person. He pushed his son from an early age in much the same way that John Mill pushed John Stuart Mill. In the process he was often cruel. "He would begin the discussion in an easy, conversational tone. This lasted exactly until I made the first mathematical mistake. Then the gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood.... Father was raging, I was weeping, and my mother did her best to defend me, although hers was a losing battle." The father pushed Wiener so well that he enrolled in Tufts University at the age of eleven finished four years later with a degree in Mathmematics. The father was also a publicity - hound who publicized his son the genius, and claimed it had nothing to do with any genetic quality or special gift of his son, but rather was solely attributable to his own educational methods. The father too saw too it that the son had a family life, and selected one of his students to be his son's wife, and practical daily life manager. Wiener despite all this went on to become a distinguished MIT professor of Mathematics, an original genius and a highly respected teacher. This autobiography is one of two and there is another work by Wiener covering his later years. However anyone who wishes to know the life- in full should also look at the biographical literature, that contains much about the life of genius he himself did not apparently wish to tell.