EX-PRODIGY

The progenitor of Cybernetics and its application in The Human Use of Human Beings (Houghton, Mifflin-1950) goes back to his own origins and his head-start on a distinguished academic career when he entered high school at 9, and college in short pants at II. Intellectually groomed by a firm father for whom scholarship was both a calling and a consecration, his childhood in Cambridge (his father was a Harvard professor) held many intellectual interests but other diversions as well. But the laurels of learning- in the company of boys far beyond his years- brought with them many emotional insecurities, the maladaptation of the misfit to which the late realization of his Jewishness contributed. Completing his academic course at Tufts in 3 years, he went to Harvard to start on his doctorate, spent a year at Cambridge, England, sat under many of the gre of his time- Santayana and Palmer and Royce and Bertrand Russell, and began as an undergraduate teacher on the same age level with his students.... A self-study which is both astute and detached, which holds no special pride in the fact that he was a ""wunderkind"" but derives its interest therefrom as well as the conclusion that his infant prodigy's progress added years of usefulness to his later life.... An intellectual market primarily.