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Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

Stanisław Marcin Ulam was a Polish-American mathematician and nuclear physicist. 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 some theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, 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 "computers" he found that Teller's "Super" design was unworkable. In January 1951, Ulam and Teller came up with the Teller–Ulam design, which became the basis for all thermonuclear weapons.

Ulam considered the problem of nuclear propulsion of rockets, which was pursued by Project Rover, and proposed, as an alternative to Rover's nuclear thermal rocket, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion, which became Project Orion. With Fermi, John Pasta, and Mary Tsingou, Ulam studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem, which became the inspiration for the field of non-linear science. He is probably best known for realising that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method has become a common and standard approach to many problems. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. April 1909 – 13. May 1984
Stanislaw Ulam photo
Stanislaw Ulam: 33   quotes 3   likes

Famous Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

“It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 3, Travels Abroad, p. 52

“It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274

“In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 95

“I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate…”

Stanislaw Ulam

as quoted by Olgierd Budrewicz in The melting-pot revisited: twenty well-known Americans of Polish background http://books.google.com/books?ei=jntPUNaTMafZ0QHMloGQBQ&id=pc51AAAAMAAJ&dq=Olgierd+Budrewicz%7C&q=Sometimes+I+muse#search_anchor, publish by Interpress, page 36, 1977.

“Thoughts are steered in different ways.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 275

“In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274

Stanislaw Ulam Quotes about mathematics

“As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 4, Princeton Days, p. 76

“Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.”

Stanislaw Ulam

In Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, Ch. 3, p. 94; as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (Springer, 2008), p. 861

“Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 277

“Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 7, The University of Wisconsin, p. 125

“For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 2, Student Years, p. 37

“In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 6, Transition And Crisis, p. 120

Stanislaw Ulam Quotes about feelings

“Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 8, Los Alamos, p. 148

“Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 10, Back At Los Alamos, p. 208
Context: I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.

“Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Preface To the 1983 Edition, p. xxvii
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

“For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 2, Student Years, p. 45 (On Ada Halpern...)
Context: Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.

“I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt "strange inside" two or three times during my life.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 2, Student Years, p. 34
Context: Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt "strange inside" two or three times during my life.

Life , Time

“It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 6, Transition And Crisis, p. 119
Context: There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".

“The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.”

Stanislaw Ulam

On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems (LA-2055, May 10, 1955) in [Stanisław Marcin Ulam, Analogies between Analogies, The Mathematical Reports of S.M. Ulam and His Los Alamos Collaborators, University of California Press, 1990, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9g50091s/]

“According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 13, Government Science, p. 258

Star , Study

“It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 3, Travels Abroad, p. 55

Science

“Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.”

Stanislaw Ulam

as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota in Words spoken at the memorial service for S. M. Ulam (The Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, May 17, 1984), published in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 6, Number 4 / December, 1984

“The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems, the second sign is that he forgets to zip up, the third sign is that he forgets to zip down.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Attributed in Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998)
This has also been attributed, with variants, to Paul Erdős, who repeated the remark.

Forgetting

“By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 14, Professor Again, p. 267

Country

“I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 96

“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Prologue, p. 5
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Change

“With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 91

“As one sharpens a knife on a whetstone, the brain can be sharpened on dull objects of thought. Every form of assiduous thinking has its value.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 278

Thinking

“I thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 1, Childhood, p. 12

Imagination , Fight

“I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 275

“What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 273-274

Mathematics

“Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 11, The 'Super', p. 222

Mathematics

“The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.”

Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 8, Los Alamos, p. 169

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