April 13 is reserved to Stanislaw Ulam

April 13 is reserved to Stanislaw Ulam
Today is the birthday of mathematician and physicist Stanislaw Ulam, who played a central role in US development of the hydrogen bomb. He was born in 1909 in Lemberg, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In 1936 he came to the US to join John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Ulam later worked with von Neumann to develop the Monte Carlo method for understanding complex systems. In 1943 Ulam became a US citizen and joined the team at Los Alamos that was developing nuclear weapons.

Ulam showed that the shock waves from a fission bomb could compress hydrogen fuel sufficiently to trigger a fusion bomb. Edward Teller ran with Ulam’s idea and proposed a configuration in which x rays emitted by the fission primary drive the process that compresses the fusion secondary. The resulting Teller–Ulam design became the model for extremely high yield hydrogen bombs. Beyond atomic weapons, Ulam considered the possibility of nuclear propulsion of spacecraft and performed early investigations into what would come to be known as chaos theory. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984 at age 75.

Article:
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.031446/full/

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