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He was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo and Bertha Wiener. Leo was an Instructor in Slavic Languages at Harvard. Norbert was educated at home until he was seven, he entered school only briefly before resuming the majority of his studies at home. In 1903 he returned to school, graduating from Ayer High School in 1906.
In September 1906, aged eleven, he entered Tufts College to study mathematics. He received his degree from Tufts in 1909 and entered Harvard. At Harvard he studied zoology but in 1910 he transferred to Cornell to begin graduate studies in philosophy, he then returned to Harvard the next year to continue his philosophy studies. Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 for a dissertation on mathematical logic.
From Harvard he went to Cambridge, England and studied under Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy. In 1914 he studied at GöttingenMap of Germany showing Gottingen Coat of Arms University of Gottingen Top The old Auditorium Maximum (1862-65 Bottom New library building Gottingen is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Gottingen. The Leine river runs th, GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east under David HilbertDavid Hilbert ( January 23, 1862 February 14, 1943) was a German mathematician born in Wehlau, near Konigsberg, Prussia (now Znamensk, near Kaliningrad, Russia) who is recognized as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th cen and Edmund LandauEdmund Georg Hermann Landau ( February 14, 1877 February 19, 1938) was a German mathematician and author of over 250 papers on number theory. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation (t. He then returned to Cambridge and then back to the USA. In 1915-16 he taught philosophy courses at Harvard, worked for General ElectricGeneral Electric Company or GE is a multinational technology and services company, one of the world's largest corporations. While it still uses its full name for legal purposes, it prefers to use the abbreviation GE in the names of its component businesse and then Encyclopedia AmericanaThe Encyclopedia Americana is a reference work targeted at young teenagers (grade 8 in the US Educational system). The current, year 2004, 175th anniversary edition has 45,000 articles containing 25 million words and was written by 6,500 contributors. before working on ballisticsBallistics ( gr. ba'llein "throw") is the science that deals with the motion, behavior, and effects of projectiles, especially bullets, gravity bombs, rockets, or the like; the science or art of designing and hurling projectiles so as to achieve a desired at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He remained in Maryland until the end of the war, when he took up a post as instructor in mathematics at MIT (after being rejected for a position at the University of Melbourne). Wiener was known among the students for his poor lecture style, his jokes, and his absent-mindedness.
While working at MIT he frequently travelled to Europe. In 1926 he married Margaret Engemann and then returned to Europe as a Guggenheim scholar . He spent most of his time at Göttingen or with Hardy at Cambridge. He worked on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems among other problems.
During World War II he worked on gunnery control which encouraged him to synthesize his interests in communication theory into cybernetics. He died in 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden.