Stanislaw Ulam

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist.

He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion.

In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Ulam was born in Lemberg, Galicia, on 13 April 1909.

At this time, Galicia was in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was known to Poles as the Austrian partition.

From 1916 until 1918, Józef's family lived temporarily in Vienna.

After they returned, Lwów became the epicenter of the Polish–Ukrainian War, during which the city experienced a Ukrainian siege.

In 1918, it became part of the newly restored Poland, the Second Polish Republic, and the city took its Polish name again, Lwów.

The Ulams were a wealthy Polish Jewish family of bankers, industrialists, and other professionals.

Ulam's immediate family was "well-to-do but hardly rich".

His father, Józef Ulam, was born in Lwów and was a lawyer, and his mother, Anna (née Auerbach), was born in Stryj.

His uncle, Michał Ulam, was an architect, building contractor, and lumber industrialist.

In 1919, Ulam entered Lwów Gymnasium Nr.

VII, from which he graduated in 1927.

He then studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute.

At the age of 20, in 1929, he published his first paper Concerning Function of Sets in the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae.

From 1931 until 1935, he traveled to and studied in Wilno (Vilnius), Vienna, Zürich, Paris, and Cambridge, England, where he met G. H. Hardy and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Along with Stanisław Mazur, Mark Kac, Włodzimierz Stożek, Kuratowski, and others, Ulam was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics.

Its founders were Hugo Steinhaus and Stefan Banach, who were professors at the Jan Kazimierz University.

Mathematicians of this "school" met for long hours at the Scottish Café, where the problems they discussed were collected in the Scottish Book, a thick notebook provided by Banach's wife.

Ulam was a major contributor to the book.

Under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski, he received his Master of Arts degree in 1932, and became a Doctor of Science in 1933.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary; Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski and Włodzimierz Stożek.

In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months.

Of the 193 problems recorded between 1935 and 1941, he contributed 40 problems as a single author, another 11 with Banach and Mazur, and an additional 15 with others.

In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months.

From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish important results regarding ergodic theory.

On 20 August 1939, he sailed for the United States for the last time with his 17-year-old brother Adam Ulam.

He became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, and a United States citizen in 1941.

In October 1943, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to join the Manhattan Project at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

There, he worked on the hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of the explosive lenses that were needed by an implosion-type weapon.

He was assigned to Edward Teller's group, where he worked on Teller's "Super" bomb for Teller and Enrico Fermi.

After the war he left to become an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to work on thermonuclear weapons.

With the aid of a cadre of female "computers" he found that Teller's "Super" design was unworkable.

In January 1951, Ulam and Teller came up with the Teller–Ulam design, which became the basis for all thermonuclear weapons.

Ulam considered the problem of nuclear propulsion of rockets, which was pursued by Project Rover, and proposed, as an alternative to Rover's nuclear thermal rocket, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion, which became Project Orion.

With Fermi, John Pasta, and Mary Tsingou, Ulam studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem, which became the inspiration for the field of nonlinear science.

He is probably best known for realizing that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method has become a common and standard approach to many problems.

In 1957, he received from Steinhaus a copy of the book, which had survived the war, and translated it into English.

In 1981, Ulam's friend R. Daniel Mauldin published an expanded and annotated version.