Stanislaw Ulam

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, 1909–1984. Ulam was born in Lvov, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine), to a wealthy Polish-Jewish banking and timber-processing family. His mentor in mathematics was Stefan Banach, a great Polish mathematician and one of the moving spirits of the Lvov School of Mathematics. Ulam received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1933 from the Lvov Polytechnic Institute, and was invited by his friend, John von Neumann, to join him at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1938 he was appointed a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He was in Europe during the summer of 1939 when his Uncle Joseph, realizing that war was at hand, insisted that Stan and his younger brother, Adam, leave Poland. Joseph, like the rest of the family, perished during the war at Nazi hands.

After his time at Harvard, Ulam secured a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin. Following a meeting with von Neumann in 1943 during which he expressed a desire to take part in the war effort, he was mysteriously invited to an unknown location in the Southwest to work on a secret project. In this fashion Ulam and his French wife Francoise Aron found themselves on a desolate mesa in New Mexico. In addition to his work on the atomic project, Ulam was included in a small sub-group headed by Edward Teller that did calculations on thermonuclear reactions. Teller wrote a critical evaluation of his work; nothing daunted, Ulam happily worked on branching processes, a necessary component of thermonuclear research, and this ultimately led him, with von Neumann, to a method of statistical analysis that is known as Monte Carlo and is still in use.

After President Truman’s order to U.S. scientists to develop a hydrogen bomb as rapidly as possible, Ulam began calculations to see whether a design by Edward Teller, the so-called Classical Super, would work. After strenuous hand calculations, Ulam and fellow mathematician Cornelius Everett concluded that the model would not work, a result confirmed after new calculations by Ulam, working this time with Enrico Fermi. A few months later, Ulam invented a new approach to H-bomb design that proved to be a breakthrough.

In 1965 Ulam took a position at the University of Colorado, but remained a consultant at Los Alamos. He spent his later years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and died there on May 13, 1984.

― Priscilla McMillan