These two volumes complete the publication of the collected papers of George Pólya, one of the most influential mathematicians and teachers of our time.
Norbert Wiener's scientific contributions not only spanned numerous branches of mathematics but also mathematical philosophy, quantum mechanics and relativity theory, and the field he christened "cybernetics" - a synthesis of communication and control engineering, the physiology of the heart and the nervous system, brain wave encephalography, and sensory prosthesis. His scholarly work also included incisive social, education, and literary essays. The object of these volumes of Collected Works is not only to reprint all of Wiener's scientific and scholarly papers but also to place them in the context of present-day research by means of commentaries written by contemporary authorities that trace both their genesis and their influence on subsequent work.
Commentaries on the papers in Volume III were written by E. J. Akutowicz, D. Bohm, G. Freud, Sir Dennis Gabor, A. E. Heins, T. Hida, E. Hille, T. Kailath, G. Kallianpur, M. Kanter, P. Masani, L. T. McAuley, P. S. Muhly, E. Nelson, J. Pincus, E. E. Robinson, H. Salehi, A Siegel, A. H. Taub, and M. S. Vallarta. Volume I, published in 1976, included Wiener's contributions to mathematical philosophy and foundations, potential theory, Brownian movement, Wiener integrals, ergodic and chaos theories, and turbulence and statistical mechanics. Volume II collected his work on generalized harmonic analysis and Tauberian theory and on classical, harmonic, and complex analysis. A projected fourth and final volume will bring together Wiener's papers on cybernetics as well as essays and articles on nonscientific subjects.
This book is twentieth in the series Mathematicians of Our Time.
