Ex-Prodigy

Ex-Prodigy PDF Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262730082
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description

Ex-Prodigy

Ex-Prodigy PDF Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262730082
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description


Norbert Wiener#A Life in Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener#A Life in Cybernetics PDF Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262347067
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography, available for the first time in one volume. Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics combines for the first time the two volumes of Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography. Published at the height of public enthusiasm for cybernetics—when it was taken up by scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, artists, and musicians—Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956) received attention from both scholarly and mainstream publications, garnering reviews and publicity in outlets that ranged from the New York Times and New York Post to the Virginia Quarterly Review. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician with extraordinarily broad interests. The son of a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, Wiener was reading Dante and Darwin at seven, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, and received a PhD from Harvard at eighteen. He joined MIT's Department of Mathematics in 1919, where he remained until his death in 1964 at sixty-nine. In Ex-Prodigy, Wiener offers an emotionally raw account of being raised as a child prodigy by an overbearing father. In I Am a Mathematician, Wiener describes his research at MIT and how he established the foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics and the theory of feedback systems. This volume makes available the essence of Wiener's life and thought to a new generation of readers.

A Prodigy's Calling

A Prodigy's Calling PDF Author: Paul F. Berliner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226835162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The coming-of-age story of a master musician in mid-twentieth century colonial Rhodesia as he learns his community’s most cherished art, all while navigating profound social transformation. Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner has been studying Zimbabwean mbira for more than fifty years. When he first arrived in what was then Rhodesia after the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom, he met Cosmas Magaya, a mbira player who would become his teacher and lifelong collaborator. A Prodigy’s Calling chronicles the early years of Magaya’s life, documenting the master mbira player’s journey from child prodigy to established expert. As a child, Magaya was immersed in mbira music through his father’s work as a healer and spirit medium. As Magaya grew, so too did his world; his performances extended beyond the family compound as his skill and knowledge increased, bringing him into contact with a society fraught with decolonial conflict. Following Magaya’s childhood, readers will learn how his upbringing guided his journey through the community’s social networks and how his early sensibilities, proclivities, and talents shaped his development. At the same time, his deepening engagement with music and the ancestors was affected by overlapping tensions between Shona cosmology and Christian ideology, rural and urban lifestyles, and the escalating African nationalist struggle and the white supremacist state. While Magaya’s story reflects profound social changes in the nation, it is also a story of musical apprenticeship. Readers following Magaya’s discovery of ever finer details in the music’s richly layered patterns will enhance their ability to hear mbira music’s forms, variations, and sonic qualities. Linocut illustrations by South African artist Lucas Bambo bring the narrative to life, and Berliner’s spirited storytelling is accompanied by QR codes that take readers directly to recordings of music as Magaya learns it. Appendices for musicians interested in learning or improving their mbira playing complement the story of Magaya’s early life. Inviting the reader into the very tradition it recounts, the book offers intimate insights into the relationships among music, Shona cosmology, and colonial politics in everyday life.

Hothouse Kids

Hothouse Kids PDF Author: Alissa Quart
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

Norbert Wiener: A Mathematician Among Engineers

Norbert Wiener: A Mathematician Among Engineers PDF Author: Jose Maria Almira
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811259380
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) is well known by the general public as the founder of Cybernetics, by mathematicians as one of the first north-American mathematicians who win international prestige — as the person who formalized Brownian motion, solved the Zaremba problem and was the author of two seminal papers devoted to Generalized Harmonic Analysis and Tauberian Theorems — and by engineers as the person who proposed much of the Fourier analysis used by them and contributed to the foundation of the statistical theory of communication — which includes the use of wave filter theory, information theory and prediction theory in control and communications as well as the automation of all types of electronic devices.Wiener's research, which was frequently motivated by physics, engineering, or biology, was a clever mixture of Fourier analysis and probability theory. His contributions to electronics through his work on filtering (that is, the separation of noise from a message), and the theory of prediction made him very valuable to electronics engineering. In addition, Wiener addressed many other topics, including the formalization of the Brownian motion, ergodic theory, wave filter theory, and information theory. Taking all these ingredients together, he ventured to create a new scientific paradigm: cybernetics.This book contains a detailed explanation of Wiener's life, his many colleagues, and the historical context in which he lived, as well as Wiener's work. It also contains a large appendix about 'Wiener, Shannon, and the rise of a Digital World'. The main focus of the book is on Wiener's work related to electrical and electronic engineering and the way he used his mathematics to create the main concepts and techniques of the statistical theory of communication. In particular, the author presents Wiener surrounded by the engineers that worked at MIT with whom he maintained strong contact. It was in this atmosphere that information theory arose, and Wiener was a main influence on the people who developed that theory.

Jews and the American Soul

Jews and the American Soul PDF Author: Andrew R. Heinze
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227918
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

Off the Charts

Off the Charts PDF Author: Ann Hulbert
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101971320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Ann Hulbert’s in-depth exploration of the lives of sixteen extraordinary children over the course of the past century casts new light on America’s current obsession with early achievement. The figures she profiles include math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics; two girls whose fiction and poetry stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple; the African-American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and “prodigious savants” with autism; and musical prodigies, present and past. Hulbert probes the changing roles of parents and teachers as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves, whose stories so intriguingly raise hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it.

Musical Prodigies

Musical Prodigies PDF Author: Claude Kenneson
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781574670462
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This is a celebration of the remarkable lives of forty-four musical prodigies from the eighteenth century to the present. With a profound appreciation for their gifts, Claude Kenneson tells the amazing stories of Mozart and Paganini, Andres Segovia and Samuel Barber, Van Cliburn and Ruggiero Ricci, Shauna Rolston and Yo-Yo Ma, to name a few. The author has nurtured several prodigies among his own cello students and brings a teacher's sensitivity to these accounts of many a perilous journey to maturity. He explores early family life, first teachers, the importance of peers, and the inevitable struggles for independence and acceptance as an adult musician. Parents and families of gifted children in all the arts will welcome this book. Young musicians will find companionship, reassurance, and insight into their own lives. And for all who have the opportunity to guide prodigious gifts, Kenneson has created an invaluable resource.

Genius Explained

Genius Explained PDF Author: Michael J. A. Howe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521008495
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This study controversially suggests genius is made not born by tracing the lives of famous figures.

The New Technological Condition

The New Technological Condition PDF Author: Georg Vrachliotis
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 303562481X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In the era of cybernetics, architects suddenly encountered entirely new ways of operating technical systems: buildings could be calculated using circuit diagrams, creativity and imagination were confronted with the technical intelligence of thinking machines. Architects found themselves in the crosshairs of cybernetics. At stake was nothing less than the continued existence of the architect’s inventive intelligence in a techno-scientific world. Today, we see computing machines, once so heavy, losing weight while gaining power. Computers are fully colonizing the human environment, creating their own digital ecosystems, and giving rise to forms of society and ways of being that cannot even be explained without big data. Available for the first time in English as a new edition.