Cornelia Dean reviews Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, in the New York Times:
It is hardly the greatest scientific mystery of the 20th century, but it is a riddle just the same: why did Norbert Wiener – gray eminence of gray matter, inventor of cybernetics, founding theorist of the information age – abandon his closest young colleagues just as they were about to embark on an exciting new collaboration on the workings of the brain?
Historians of science, and even some of Wiener’s associates, have long puzzled over this question. Now Ms. Conway and Mr. Siegelman offer an answer. In their new biography, they tell a tale of jealousy, false accusations of sexual misconduct and twisted family relations…
By the time he was 14 he had a diploma from Tufts and by 18 he had earned a doctorate in mathematical philosophy from Harvard. One newspaper called him “the most remarkable boy in the world.”
But these achievements came at a cost.
More here.