Abstract
Wiener needed contacts outside mathematics for the inception of his own ideas. The electrical engineers at MIT had fulfilled this need during the 1920s, as had Max Born, cf. §§ 9A, 10B. But in the early 1930s it was G.D. Birkhoff’s great discovery of the Individual Ergodic Theorem that brought Wiener into touch with one of his important collaborators. Soon after the appearance of Birkhoff’s paper in 1931, a young German mathematical astrophysicist from the Potsdam Observatory, Eberhard Hopf, came to Harvard to study ergodic theory. As an ardent Gibbsian and Lebesguist, Wiener was quite excited by Birkhoff’s discovery, and Hopf and he began discussing it in earnest. These conversations were instrumental in propelling Wiener to a proper appreciation of Birkhoff’s theorem and toward a conception of statistical mechanics in which the Birkhoff theorem is central (cf. § 12A).
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© 1990 Birkhäuser Verlag Basel
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Masani, P.R. (1990). The Collaboration with E. Hopf and R.E.A.C. Paley. In: Norbert Wiener 1894–1964. Vita Mathematica, vol 5. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9252-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9252-0_11
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser Basel
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