Page 24 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

4 Modern Robotics

In his second autobiographical volume, I Am a Mathematician,
published in 1956, Wiener elevated walking to a metaphor about the
precariousness of life:

The equilibrium of the human body, like most equilibria which we
find in life processes, is not static but results from a continuous inter-
play of processes which resist in an active way any tendency for them
to lead to a breakdown. Our standing and our walking are thus a
continual jujitsu against gravity, as life is a perpetual wrestling match
with death.

Perhaps it was because Wiener could not take natural coordina-
tion for granted that he would be driven to study it in such detail
and create new science to explain it.
Wiener was eventually returned to the school system, graduat-
ing from high school when he was only 11 years old. A year later,
Wiener enrolled at Tufts College (later Tufts University) in Medford,
Massachusetts, and he was featured on the pages of the New York
World as the youngest college student in American history. Wiener
wanted to major in zoology, but as he noted later in his autobiog-
raphy, his chemistry classes resulted in “probably the greatest cost
in apparatus per experiment ever run up by a Tufts undergradu-
ate”—and the results of dissections in the biology lab were little
better. Gradually, these physical failures drove him to focus more on
mathematics, where “one’s blunders . . . can be corrected . . . with
a stroke of the pencil.” After only three years, the now 15-year-old
Wiener earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. By then math-
ematics professors were even letting him lecture to their classes.

Brilliant Mathematician

Enrolling at Harvard, Wiener made another attempt to study zool-
ogy, but he proved to be as uncomfortable as ever with laboratory
work. Partly at his father’s urging, he then accepted a graduate
scholarship at Cornell University, where he studied philosophy and
mathematics. Still dissatisfied, Wiener returned to Harvard in 1911,