Stanislaw Ulam - Impact and Legacy

Impact and Legacy

With his pivotal role in the development of thermonuclear weapons, Stanislaw Ulam changed the world. He felt very little guilt. According to Françoise Ulam: "Stan would reassure me that, barring accidents, the H-bomb rendered nuclear war impossible." Since the end of World War II, this prediction has held.

In 1980, Ulam and his wife appeared in the television documentary The Day After Trinity.

The Monte Carlo method has become a ubiquitous and standard approach to computation. In addition to problems in science and mathematics, the method has been applied to: finance, social science, environmental risk assessment, linguistics, radiation therapy, sports, and many other fields. In 2011, a search for books about the method on amazon.com, produced more than 13,000 items.

The Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem is credited not only as "the birth of experimental mathematics", but also as inspiration for the vast field of Nonlinear Science. In his Lilienfeld Prize lecture, Donald Campbell noted this relationship and described how FPU gave rise to ideas in chaos, solitons, and dynamical systems. In 1980, Donald Kerr, laboratory director at Los Alamos, with the strong support of Ulam and Mark Kac, founded the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS). Alwyn Scott was its first director, and Kac was chairman of its first external advisory committee, on which Martin Kruskal also served. The purpose of CNLS is to continue the laboratory's tradition of work in nonlinear science, which began with FPU, but which also includes Mitchell Feigenbaum's important work in chaos and fractals (1975). In 1985, CNLS initiated the Stanislaw M. Ulam Distinguished Scholar program, which provides a prestigious annual award that enables a noted scientist to spend a year carrying out research at Los Alamos. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the original FPU paper, the problem was the subject of a focus issue of the journal Chaos, and of the 25th Annual International Conference of CNLS.

The University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Florida supported the Ulam Quarterly, which was active from 1992 to 1996, and which was one of the first online mathematical journals. Florida's Department of Mathematics has sponsored, since 1998, the annual Ulam Colloquium Lecture, and in March 2009, the Ulam Centennial Conference.

In 1985, Beyer, Sellers, and Waterman reviewed Ulam's contributions to theoretical biology in terms of his work in cellular automata theory, population biology, pattern recognition, and biometric spaces. In much of this work, Ulam attempted to define distance metrics, which differ from Euclidian distances, but which are appropriate measures in the context of molecular biology. In 1982, Ulam gave an overview of these ideas in his Gamow memorial lecture at the University of Colorado. His Los Alamos colleague, Walter Goad, has described their impact on sequence analysis.

In 1987, Los Alamos issued a special issue of its Science publication, which summarized his accomplishments, and which appeared, in 1989, as the book From Cardinals to Chaos. Similarly, in 1990, the University of California Press issued a compilation of mathematical reports by Ulam and his Los Alamos collaborators: Analogies Between Analogies.

During his career, Ulam was awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh.