Stanislaw ulam autobiography of a face

1.1. From the Preface.

In introducing the collection of problems forming the substance of this work, it is perhaps necessary to offer more explanations than is usually the case for a mathematical monograph. The problems listed are regarded as unsolved in the sense that the author does not know the answers. In this sense the structure of this small collection differs inherently from that of the well-known collection of problems by Pólya and Szego. The questions, drawn from several fields of mathematics, are by no means chosen to represent the central problems of these fields, but rather reflect the personal interests of the author. For the main part, the motif of the collection is a set-theoretical point of view and a combinatorial approach to problems in point set topology, some elementary parts of algebra, and the theory of functions of a real variable.

In spirit, the questions considered in the first part of this collection belong to a complex of problems represented in the Scottish Book. This was a list of problems compiled by mathematicians of Lwów in Poland before World War II, also containing problems written down by visiting mathematicians from other cities in Poland and from other countries. The author has recently translated this document into English and distributed it privately; the interest shown by some mathematicians in this collection encouraged him to prepare the present tract for publication. Many of the problems contained here were indeed first inscribed in the Scottish Book, but the greater part of the material is of later origin beginning with the years spent at Harvard (1936-1940) and a large proportion stems from recent years. appearing here for the first time. Many of the problems originated through conversations with others and were stimulated by the transitory interests of the moment in various mathematical centres. In addition, several

The Institute for Advanced Study distributed $21,742.50 in stipends for mathematics and $10,000 for theoretical physics during the academic year 1935–36. Three hundred dollars, sufficient to secure entry to the United States, was awarded to the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909–84), who had written to John von Neumann about a problem in measure theory in 1934. Von Neumann followed up by arranging to meet at the train station in Warsaw while returning from a conference of topologists in Moscow in 1935. The Institute’s formal invitation followed, with Ulam sailing for New York aboard the Aquitania in December 1935. He and von Neumann remained intellectually inseparable until von Neumann’s death.

Françoise Ulam (née Fanchon Aron, 1918–2011) was born in a cellar during the bombardment of Paris at the end of World War I. Her family, who were “left-wing intelligentsia on one side and upper-crust Bohemianism on the other,” moved to Morocco in 1927, leaving her for two years on Place Saint-Michel in Paris with a childless aunt and uncle who were ardent communists, managers of a publishing house, and hosts of a celebrated literary salon. She learned English from a copy of Alice in Wonderland given to her by a British exchange student her hosts had taken in. In her own memoir, From Paris to Los Alamos, she plays the part of Alice, encountering many of the leading figures in twentieth-century mathematics and physics along the way.

Françoise applied to the Institute for International Education as an exchange student to the USA, and, in August of 1938, sailed for New York, making her way from there to Mills College in California by Greyhound bus. When her year at Mills was up, her mother warned her not to return to France, so she obtained a graduate scholarship to Mount Holyoke college in Massachusetts. There, at a party in Cambridge in the fall of 1939, she met Stan, who had secured a three-year fellowship under George David Birkho

Polish mathematician and physicist (1909–1984)

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (Polish:[sta'ɲiswaf 'mart͡ɕin 'ulam]; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved a number of theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary; Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski and Włodzimierz Stożek. In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish important results regarding ergodic theory. On 20 August 1939, he sailed for the United States for the last time with his 17-year-old brother Adam Ulam. He became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, and a United States citizen in 1941.

In October 1943, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to join the Manhattan Project at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. There, he worked on the hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of the explosive lenses that were needed by an implosion-type weapon. He was assigned to Edward Teller's group, where he worked on Teller's "Super" bomb for Teller and Enrico Fermi. After the war he left to become an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to work on thermonuclear weapons. With the aid of a cadre of female

Biography