Small Wonder

EX-PRODIGY: MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (309 pp)--Norbert Wiener--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

At seven, Norbert Wiener was already interested in chemistry and physics, so his college-professor father set up a small laboratory for him in their home in Cambridge, Mass. But since Norbert was not the kind of lad to lose himself in sterile specialization, he also looked into zoology botany--particularly into "structure and the problems of growth." It soon became clear that little Norbert was a scientific prodigy, one of the most brilliant ever to appear in the U.S. At nine he entered high school; at eleven he was enrolled at Tufts College, a dumpy little boy with thick glasses who found the classroom seats disconcertingly large.

Ex-Prodigy is Norbert Wiener's memoir of his difficult years as a child genius. Now a mathematics professor at M.I.T. and a pioneer in the development of machines to do the work of men (Cybernetics-TIME, Dec. 27, 1948), he has written a book that rivals in psychological interest, if not in literary skill, the recollections of such other youthful prodigies as John Stuart Mill and Samuel Butler.

Fool! Donkey! Ass!" Papa Wiener was a character in his own right. Omnivorous scholar, fanatical Tolstoyan rigid vegetarian, amateur farmer and heterodox Slavic philologist, Bialystok-born Leo Wiener was an austere and aloof yet somehow lovable paterfamilias. Papa was dissatisfied with ordinary schools and instructed Norbert personally until the boy went to high school. Papa, a good teacher was also an irascible man, and whenever Norbert stumbled, there would come streaming down upon him a flood of invective in German: "Fool! Donkey! Ass!"

Even when Norbert started going to school, the parental tyranny continued.

At this time, in addition to teaching his regular classes at Harvard, papa had undertaken to translate 24 volumes of Tolstoy in 24 months, and in the evenings, while scribbling furiously and peering into proofs, he would hear out Norbert's lessons. And though he was listening with only half an ear, that was quite enough to catch Norbert in his mistakes.

Inevitably, little Norbert turned out to be something of an infantile monster. Once, when a Latin tutor annoyed him, he turned the garden hose on the fellow. Another time, when his parents sent him to a Unitarian Sunday school to give him some contact with other children, little Atheist Norbert got into debates with the minister on the existence of God.

Greek v. Trivialities. The crisis in young Norbert's life came after his graduation from college at 14. Neither child nor man, he was physically exhausted and suddenly troubled by "one of the greatest realizations that the infant prodigy must make: he is not wanted by the community." Enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard, Norbert was frequently miserable. "I had no proper idea of personal cleanliness and personal neatness, and I myself never knew when I was to blurt out some unpardonable rudeness." By now, he wanted to rebel against papa, yet he lacked the daring to do so. At Harvard he was looked upon as something of a freak, for there, writes Wiener with a bitterness that the years do not seem to have erased, "a gentlemanly indifference" toward matters of the mind was very much the style. And most disturbing of all was his encounter with antiSemitism. Norbert had been brought up without any sense of Jewish tradition, his mother had once denied to him that the family was Jewish at all, and he was entirely unprepared for the prejudice he encountered.

But somehow he managed to come out of it all. He got his Ph.D. at 18, and did graduate work in philosophy under Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Josiah Royce and George Santayana. For a time he vacillated between mathematics and philosophy, finally chose math, with brilliant results. Looking back on his youth, Norbert Wiener tries hard to strike a judicious balance. He still admires the standards of scholarship and devotion to intellectual matters he learned from his father. He cannot help agreeing with papa that it was worth learning geometry, Greek, Latin and German "at an age when most boys are learning trivialities." But, he adds, "my boyhood was not all cakes and ale."

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