I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy

Wiener's second autobiographical volume covers his mature career at MIT, from the 1920s through the founding of cybernetics in the 1940s and its aftermath. He describes how wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction led him to the feedback concept that would connect control engineering, neuroscience, and communication theory into a single framework. The book is remarkable for its honesty about the social and institutional dimensions of scientific work — the collaborations with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, the Macy Conferences, the tensions with colleagues who took cybernetics in directions Wiener found troubling. Written in a discursive, sometimes digressive style that mirrors the cross-disciplinary thinking it describes, the memoir captures the moment when information, feedback, and purpose became unified concepts. It remains the most direct account of how the father of cybernetics understood his own creation.