Summary

Read the summary of the text and fill in the gaps 1-5 with the sentences A-F. There is one sentence that you do not need to use.
  1. Throughout his education Leo was deeply interested in mathematics, although he never used his mathematical skills in any jobs he held.
  2. Norbert Wiener was a pacifist but had to wear a uniform when the World War I broke out.
  3. He is a founder of cybernetics, a new field that formalizes the idea of feedback.
  4. Thanks to this tutelage and his own abilities, Wiener became a child prodigy.
  5. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to overcome economic underdevelopment.
Norbert Wiener was an American theoretical and applied mathematician. 1   This field has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.
Norbert Wiener was greatly influenced by his father Leo Wiener who was an extraordinary person. He attended medical school in Warsaw but was unhappy with the profession, so he went to Berlin to begin training as an engineer. But he didn’t like it either. 2   In the USA Leo tried his hand at various jobs in factories and farms before becoming a school teacher. He progressed from being a language teacher in schools to becoming Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Missouri.
Leo taught his son at home. 3   He left school at the age of 11 and graduated from college when he was 14 with the degree in mathematics. After that he went to study zoology at Harvard and later switched to philosophical studies. At long last Wiener was awarded a Ph.D. in 1912, when he was 18, for a dissertation on mathematical logic. In 1914, Wiener travelled to Europe where he studied under such great mathematicians as Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen.
During his scientific career Wiener worked on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis, and the Tauberian theorems. He broke new ground in cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. 4 
5   During World War II he worked on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns, which led Wiener to communication theory and eventually to formulate cybernetics. After the war, he became concerned with political interference in scientific research, and the militarization of science. He declined an invitation to join the Manhattan Project, and was arguably the most distinguished scientist to do so. During the Cold War Wiener was even placed under suspicion because he freely shared his theories and findings, credited the contributions of others and was well-disposed towards Soviet researchers and their findings.