Beschreibung:

WIENER, Norbert (1894-1964). The extrapolation, interpretation and smoothing of stationary time series with engineering applications . [Washington, D.C.: National Defense Research Council,] 1942. 4 o. Reproduced typescript. Original plain orange wrappers. Stamped "Restricted" in red ink on upper cover, title page, table of contents, preface, and introduction; boxed. Provenance : stamp of the Document Room at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, where Wiener performed the work described in the present paper. FIRST EDITION, No. 148 of 300 copies. Wiener, a child prodigy, entered Tufts University in 1906 at the age of eleven, graduating with a degree in mathematics at age fourteen. During his years at Tufts, he studied mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, and biology, with a particular interest in the last two subjects. He began his graduate work at Harvard in 1909, when he was not quite fifteen years of age. At first Wiener studied zoology, but his myopia and physical clumsiness made him unsuited for laboratory work, so after one semester he transferred to Cornell University to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. In 1911 Wiener re-entered Harvard University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1913 with a thesis on mathematical logic. The next few years he spent in postgraduate work (cut short by World War I), teaching, and in assisting the United States war effort by helping to construct new artillery range tables at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. There he learned at first hand the time-consuming drudgery of preparing mathematical tables. In 1919 Wiener joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained for the rest of his career. During World War II Wiener worked with the Fire Control Division of the National Defense Research Committee on anti-aircraft fire control -- specifically, the problem of designing a gun to aim automatically at a high-speed moving target guided by a purposeful human intelligence. Wiener and his assistant Julian Bigelow tackled the problem of extrapolating an airplane's future path from its past actions, using probability theory and treating the plane's path as a stationary time series. According to Shannon, in the Mathematical Theory of Communications this classified monograph, "contains the first clear-cut formulation of communication theory as a statistical problem, the study of operations on time series." Wiener shared in the development of information theory with Claude Shannon. In the historical introduction to Cybernetics (1948), Wiener wrote about what he called "communication engineering": "To cover this aspect of communication engineering, we had to develop a statistical theory of the amount of information, in which the unit amount of information was that transmitted as a single decision between equally probable alternatives. This idea occurred at about the same time to several writers, among them the statistician R. A. Fisher, Dr. Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and the author. Fisher's motive in studying this subject is to be found in classical statistical theory; that of Shannon in the problem of coding information, and that of the author in the problem of noise and message in electrical filters... The notion of the amount of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics; that of entropy . Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other..." (Wiener, Cybernetics [1948] 10-11). Wiener's report was extremely difficult to read, and thus was known to generations of students after the war as the "yellow peril" after its plain yellow wrappers. When OOC was written there were five copies cited in OCLC, of which four were in the United States and one was at Glasgow University. OOC 990.