Stanislaw Ulam - Quotations About Ulam

Quotations About Ulam

Georgia O'Keeffe, on seeing Ulam at a party in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Who is that man?

Hugo Steinhaus:

C'est l'homme au monde qui pose le mieux les problemes.
(He is the man in the world who knows best how to create and formulate problems.)

David Hawkins:

Stan would dramatize a topic, suggest a pathway, and then I would do the work.

Otto Frisch, the discoverer of the possibility of chain reactions from fission, in an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing his first impressions of Los Alamos:

I also met Stan Ulam early on, a brilliant Polish topologist with a charming French wife. At once he told me that he was a pure mathematician who had sunk so low that his latest paper actually contained numbers with decimal points!

Hans Bethe:

After the H-bomb was made, reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother, because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife.

Paul Erdős:

He died suddenly of heart failure, without fear or pain, while he could still prove and conjecture.