Modesty Is Not a Virtue: Norbert Wiener (1995) (cs.nyu.edu)

This review surveys Pesi Masani’s biography Norbert Wiener: 1894–1964 (1990) and the posthumous publication of Wiener’s short manuscript Invention (completed 1954, published 1993 with an introduction by S.J. Heims). Masani’s book is praised as a comprehensive portrait of Wiener the mathematician, logician, and social critic; the review underscores Wiener’s deep technical legacy—Wiener measure and process, Wiener–Hopf equations, Paley–Wiener theorems, Wiener extrapolation for linear time series, and generalized harmonic analysis—and notes how his coinage of “cybernetics” seeded much of modern systems thinking. Invention itself is a compact, uneven work found in MIT archives decades after Wiener abandoned it; it mixes historical case studies (including a reprise of the Heaviside–Pupin controversy), reflections on invention, and polemics against “megabuck science,” but repeatedly returns to a central theme: invention as the act of individual genius—“acts of Grace”—and the ambiguous rewards fame brings. For the AI/ML community, the review is a reminder that much foundational mathematics underpinning probabilistic modeling, signal processing, and control theory traces to Wiener, and that his cultural critique remains timely. Invention’s skeptical take on large, commodified science and its emphasis on individual creativity speaks directly to contemporary debates about big‑lab AI culture, incentives, and the social role of engineers. Though the book is diffuse and imperfect, its recovered voice enriches historical and philosophical perspectives on how invention, mathematics, and societal structures shape technological trajectories.