IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 46

IKEHARA COLLECTION

comments about Wiener's Jewish
heritage and how his discovery of it
somehow meant that he "had to ...
make an effort to grow into a whole
being" (see Figure 10).
As a whole, this collection offers
an important new data set and,
to borrow from Wiener's lexicon,
a series of "feedback loops" that
enable us to retrospectively confirm
or adjust our understanding of different aspects of his life and professional
relationships. Some of the documents
corroborate the accounts already available to us in published form. Wiener's
1935 impressions of the differences
between the Japanese universities he
visited offer a case in point here. As
his autobiography recalls, he noticed
that "the Tokyo [University] professors
looked slightly down their noses at
their associates at the lesser universities"; by contrast, his impression
of the Osaka University mathematics
department was much more enthusiastic: "it is from this group that many
of the best Japanese mathematicians have come, such as Yoshida
and Kakutani, who stand among the
best mathematicians anywhere" [1,
p. 184]. A postcard from the Ikehara
collection offers a near-perfect echo
of these sentiments, and adds on a
note of praise for his former student.
Wiener writes to Ikehara: "The Osaka
school of mathematics is one of the

Figure 4. Note, June 16, 1935.

nese press presented Wiener and his
ideas to their readers. Papers printed
extended summaries of the basic
"helmsman" metaphor at the root
of the cybernetics project (see Figure 10) and anecdotes about his discussions with high-ranking industry
figures (like the president of Nozawa
Asbestos) about the implications
of automation for issues of labor
and unemployment (see Figure  9).
They also offered more troubling

IKEHARA COLLECTION

biography. He sent delightfully gushing letters to Ikehara both before
and after his trips (see Figures 6-8),
and the headlines of several Japanese newspaper articles - including one rather humorous phrase
pointing out how Wiener and his wife
have been "Smacking [their] Lips
Over Tempura" (see Figure 9) - offer
insight into the day-to-day activities
of the mathematician's travel schedule. We also get to see how the Japa-

Figure 5. Dr. Wiener and cybernetics article.

46

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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June 2017



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