Josiah Willard Gibbs in which he used as epigraph a remark attributed to Gibbs: "Mathematics is a language." Samuelson later explained that in his understanding of prices his "debts were not primarily to Pareto or Slutsky, but to the great thermodynamicist, Willard Gibbs of Yale." Mathematician Norbert Wiener cited Gibbs's use of probability in the formulation of statistical mechanics as "the first great revolution of twentieth century physics" and as a major influence on his conception of cybernetics. Wiener explained in the preface to his book "The Human Use of Human Beings" that it was "devoted to the impact of the Gibbsian point
Norbert Wiener him prominently displayed in one of the hallways, often used in giving directions. In 1926, Wiener returned to Europe as a Guggenheim scholar. He spent most of his time at Göttingen and with Hardy at Cambridge, working on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis, and the Tauberian theorems. In 1926, Wiener's parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann; they had two daughters. His sister, Constance, married Philip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener's niece, married Václav E. Beneš. Many tales, perhaps apocryphal, were told of him at MIT, especially concerning his absent-mindedness. It was said