Stanislaw Ulam - Return To Academia

Return To Academia

During his years at Los Alamos, Ulam was a visiting professor at: Harvard, 1951/52, MIT, 1956/57, the University of California, San Diego, 1963, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, 1961/62 and 1965/67. In 1967, the last of these positions became permanent, when Ulam was appointed as professor and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Boulder. However, he kept a residence in Santa Fe, which made it convenient to spend summers at Los Alamos as a consultant.

In Colorado, where he rejoined his friends Gamow, Richtmyer, and Hawkins, Ulam's research interests turned toward biology. In 1968, recognizing this emphasis, the University of Colorado School of Medicine appointed Ulam as Professor of Biomathematics, and he held this position until his death. With his Los Alamos colleague Robert Schrandt he published a report, "Some Elementary Attempts at Numerical Modeling of Problems Concerning Rates of Evolutionary Processes", which applied some of his earlier ideas on branching processes to biological inheritance. Another, report, with William Beyer, Temple F. Smith, and M. L. Stein, titled "Metrics in Biology", introduced some new ideas about biometric distances.

When he retired from Colorado in 1975, Ulam had begun to spend winter semesters at the University of Florida, where he was a graduate research professor.

Except for sabbaticals at the University of California, Davis, 1982/83, and at Rockefeller University, 1980/84, this pattern of spending summers in Colorado and Los Alamos and winters in Florida continued until Ulam died on May 13, 1984, in Santa Fe. Françoise Ulam continued to live there until she died on April 30, 2011, at the age of 93.