Home > Stanislaw Marcin Ulam

1 Biography

Ulam was born in Lwów, Poland (then also called Lemberg and part of Galicja, an autonomous province of Austria-Hungary, now L'viv, Ukraine). His master in mathematics was Stefan Banach, a great Polish mathematician, one of the moving spirits of the Lwów School of Mathematics.

Ulam went to the US in 1938 as a Harvard Junior Fellow. When his fellowship was not renewed, he served on the faculty at the University of WisconsinThe University of Wisconsin System is the state university system in Wisconsin. It is made up of two doctoral-granting universities ( UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee), eleven baccalaureate-granting universities ( UW-Eau Claire, UW-Green Bay, UW-La Crosse, UW-, and supported his brother, Adam, who had fled from Poland on the eve of World War. While there, in the midst of World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough, his friend John von NeumannA separate article covers Saint John Neumann, the American priest. John von Neumann (Neumann Janos) ( December 28, 1903 February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian- American mathematician who made important contributions in quantum physics, set theory, computer sci invited him to a secret project in New MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the southwestern United States and its U. postal abbreviation is NM . The state's two official languages are English and Spanish. Nuevo Mexico was the Spanish name for the territory north and west of the Rio Grande. USS New Mexico. To research the invitation, Ulam checked out a book on New Mexico from the University Library, and found, listed on the library check-out card, those who had successively disappeared from the campus at the UW. Ulam then joined the Manhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project or more fully, the Manhattan Engineering District Project was an effort during World War II to develop the first nuclear weapons by the United States with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. Its research was directed by Am at Los AlamosLos Alamos National Laboratory (LANL is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed by the University of California, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the.

While there, he suggested the Monte Carlo Method for evaluating complicated mathematical integrals that arise in the theory of nuclear chain reactions (not knowing that Fermi and others had used the method earlier). This suggestion led to the development of Monte Carlo by Von Neumann, Metropolis, and others.

Ulam—in collaboration with C. J. Everett , who did the detailed calculations—showed Edward Teller's early model of the hydrogen bomb to be inadequate. Ulam then went on to suggest a better method himself. He was the first one to realize that all of the of H-bomb's components could be put inside one casing, put a fission bomb at one end and thermonuclear material at the other, and use shock waves from the fission bomb to compress and detonate fusion fuel.

Teller resisted this idea at first, then saw its merit and suggested the use of radiation rather than shock waves. "Radiation implosion", as the method came to be called, has been the standard method of creating H-bombs ever since. Ulam and Teller jointly applied for a patent on the hydrogen bomb.

Ulam also invented nuclear pulse propulsion, and at the end of his life, declared it the invention of which he was most proud.

He was an early proponent of the use of computers to perform "mathematical experiments". His most notable contribution in this area may have been his part in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiments , an early numerical study of a dynamical system.

In pure mathematics, he worked in set theory (including measurable cardinals and abstract measures), topology, ergodic theory, and other fields. After World War II he largely turned from rigorous pure mathematics to speculative and imaginative work, posing problems and making conjectures (which had always been specialties of his) that often concerned the application of mathematics to physics and biology. His friend Gian-Carlo Rota ascribed this change to an attack of encephalitis in 1946 that Rota claimed changed Ulam's personality (though detail had never been Ulam's strong point). This suggestion is believed by many but rejected by Ulam's widow, Françoise , among others.

Ulam took a position at the University of Colorado in 1965. As he remained a consultant at Los Alamos, he divided his time between Boulder, Colorado, USA and Santa Fe, New Mexico, from which he commuted to Los Alamos. Later he and his wife spent winters in Gainesville, Florida, where he had a position with the University of Florida. He died in Santa Fe.