... a small woman, healthy, vigorous and vivacious.

I was brought up in a house of learning. My father was the author of several books, and ever since I can remember, the sound of the typewriter and the smell of the paste pot have been familiar to me. ... I had full liberty to roam in what was the very catholic and miscellaneous library of my father. At one period or other the scientific interests of my father had covered most of the imaginable subjects of study. ... I was an omnivorous reader ...

My chief deficiency was arithmetic. Here my understanding was far beyond my manipulation, which was definitely poor. My father saw quite correctly that one of my chief difficulties was that manipulative drill bored me. He decided to take me out of school and put me on algebra instead of arithmetic, with the purpose of offering a greater challenge and stimulus to my imagination.

I owe a great deal to my Ayer friends. I was given a chance to go through some of the gawkiest stages of growing up in an atmosphere of sympathy and understanding.

... mathematics was not only a subject to be done in the study but one to be discussed and lived with.

... this study introduced me to the theory of probability. Moreover, it led me very directly to the periodogram, and to the study of forms of harmonic analysis more general than the classical Fourier series and Fourier integral. All these concepts have combined with the engineering preoccupations of a professor of the Mathematical Institute of Technology to lead me to make both theoretical and practical advances in the theory of communication, and ultimately to found the discipline of cybernetics, which is in essence a statistical approach to the theory of communication. Thus, varied as my scientific interests seem to be, there has been a single thread connecting all of them from my first mature work ...

All too often Wiener could not resist the temptation to tell everything that cropped up in his comprehensive mind, and he often had difficulty in separating the relevant mathematics neatly from its scientific and social implications and even from his personal experiences. The reader to whom he appears to be addressing himself seems to alternate in a random order between the layman, the undergraduate student of mathematics, the average mathematician, and Wiener himself.

While studying anti-aircraft fire control, Wiener may have conceived the idea of considering the operator as part of the steering mechanism and of applying to him such notions as feedback and stability, which had been devised for mechanical systems and electrical circuits. ... As time passed, such flashes of insight were more consciously put to use in a sort of biological research ... [Cybernetics] has contributed to popularising a way of thinking in communication theory terms, such as feedback, information, control, input, output, stability, homeostasis, prediction, and filtering. On the other hand, it also has contributed to spreading mistaken ideas of what mathematics really means.

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an adviser to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much from mathematics.

Even measured by Wiener's standards "Cybernetics" is a badly organised work -- a collection of misprints, wrong mathematical statements, mistaken formulas, splendid but unrelated ideas, and logical absurdities. It is sad that this work earned Wiener the greater part of his public renown, but this is an afterthought. At that time mathematical readers were more fascinated by the richness of its ideas than by its shortcomings.

In appearance and behaviour, Norbert Wiener was a baroque figure, short, rotund, and myopic, combining these and many qualities in extreme degree. His conversation was a curious mixture of pomposity and wantonness. He was a poor listener. His self-praise was playful, convincing and never offensive. He spoke many languages but was not easy to understand in any of them. He was a famously bad lecturer.

As a human being Wiener was above all stimulating. I have known some who found the stimulus unwelcome. He could offend publicly by snoring through a lecture and then asking an awkward question in the discussion, and also privately by proffering information and advice on some field remote from his own to an august dinner companion. I like to remember Wiener as I once saw him late at night in Magdalen College, Oxford, surrounded by a spellbound group of undergraduates, talking, endlessly talking.