IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 44

commentary

Heather Love

Introducing a New Archive

The Ikehara
Collection:
Norbert Wiener's
Japan Connections

t IEEE - SSIT's July
2016 conference on
"Norbert Wiener in
the 21st Centur y:
Thinking Machines
in the Physical World," presenters
from a variety of disciplines offered
their thoughts on the diverse intellectual and cultural lineages that link
Wiener's work - and early cybernetics more broadly - to contemporary issues in technology studies.
Topics spanned contexts ranging
from engineering, physics, and biology to sociology, political science, and cultural studies.
And, thanks to an unexpected and serendipitous connection with Osamu Hirota
(soon-to-retire professor and
director of the Quantum ITC
Research Institute at Tokyo's
Tamagawa University), a previously unseen archive of
material added a new historical dimension to our discussions. What I am calling "The
Ikehara Collection" shows
The Wieners playing in Nara. From the right: Dr. Wiener,
us one of cybernetics' previMr. Ikehara, Mrs. Wiener.
ously under-explored paths of
influence: into the world of Japanese
students; he studied at M.I.T. throughphysics and information technology.
out the 1920s, receiving his Bachelor's
It opens up exciting new possibilities
degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1930.
for understanding how Wiener's ideas
As Wiener described Ikehara's work
have promulgated around the globe
from that time, he "was perfecting my
into the present.
methods in prime-number theory. ...
Shikao Ikehara (see Figure 1) was
The result was to remove a difficult
one of Norbert Wiener's early graduate
branch of mathematics from the latter
years of graduate work and to make it
valuable even in an advanced underDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2697062
Date of publication: 8 June 2017
graduate course" [1, p. 135-136]. Ike-

A

44

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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hara's and Wiener's names
are most famously linked on
the prime number theorem
they produced during that
time - the so-called "WienerIkehara" theorem, notice of
which appeared in Japanese
newspapers that hailed Ikehara as a "Shining" "WorldClass Genius" (see Figure 2)
[2], [3]. The two remained in
contact during the years after
Ikehara completed his Ph.D.,
not only when he continued
as an M.I.T. research associate in 1931 and 1932, but also after
he returned to Japan in 1934 to take
up a position as Assistant Professor at
Osaka University's Department of Science. As Wiener's 1956 autobiography, I am a Mathematician indicates,
this return was largely motivated
by American hiring prejudice in the
1930s. "At that time," Wiener tells us,
"the engineer from Eastern countries
did already exist in the United States,
June 2017



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