Stanisław Ulam

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909 to 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician, born in Lemberg, now Lviv, who studied at the Lwow Polytechnic Institute. From 1943 he worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos at the invitation of John von Neumann, and he remained there until 1967, working on the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller. MacTutor credits him with devising the Monte Carlo method of solving mathematical problems by statistical sampling with random numbers. The idea came to him in 1946, while he was convalescing and playing solitaire, and he described it to von Neumann, after which they began to plan actual calculations. With Nicholas Metropolis he wrote the 1949 paper The Monte Carlo Method, and the method is now widely used in computer implementations of mathematical software. Later he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado while still consulting at Los Alamos. He died in Santa Fe on 13 May 1984.