Ebook: Los Alamos Science Number 15: Special Issue on Stanislaw Ulam 1909-1984

Stan Ulam, brilliant mathematician, participant in the Manhattan Project, and co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, was one of those extraordinary men who solidified LANL's early reputation. Stan left a legacy in mathematics, physics, and biology, reflecting his immense intelligence and gift for abstraction. He was a catalyst for new programs at LANL and offered novel ideas even to fields he knew little about. In this volume, mathematicians and physicists who were very close to Stan describe his influence on their way of thinking. Their own contributions to fields in which Stan played a seminal role-from probability theory and nonlinear systems to the Monte Carlo method, heuristic mathematics, and DNA sequence analysis- were also discussed. In the closing section of this volume, called "The Ulam Touch-Unpublished Items," the reader gets a direct feel for Ulam's irrepressible wit and imagination.