Stanislaw Ulam.

The son of a lawyer, Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (pronounced "EW-lahm") was born in 1909 in the town of Lwów (or Lemberg), Poland, which at that time was in the Austrian Empire. He was fascinated by mathematics and by Albert Einstein's relativity theories. At the age of twenty, he published his first mathematical paper. He attended the Polytechnic Institute in Lwów and obtained his doctorate in 1933. In 1936, the famed mathematician John von Neumann invited Ulam to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1941, Ulam became a U.S. citizen. In February, 1944, as World War II raged overseas, von Neumann brought Ulam to the heart of the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Its aim was to invent an atomic bomb. Meanwhile, working under physicist Edward Teller, Ulam investigated the feasibility of building an even more powerful hydrogen bomb. The first atomic bomb was exploded in July, 1945. To develop nuclear weapons, scientists made extremely complex calculations based on high-speed interactions of numerous subatomic particles. They used an early, slow generation of electronic computers. In 1946, Ulam thought of a way to hasten the calculations. While recovering from the illness encephalitis and playing the card game solitaire, he realized that he could better anticipate the outcome of his game by making intelligent bets based on a few cards, rather than on his entire hand. Likewise, he could simplify and speed nuclear calculations by basing them on the behavior, or "life histories," of a small sample of typical particles. With von Neumann, Ulam developed this technique, later called the Monte Carlo method after the casino resort. INSET: Stanislaw Ulam.