Stanisław Marcin Ulam 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 some theorems and proposed several conjectures.
Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. The name comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, where the primary developer of the method, physicist Stanislaw Ulam, was inspired by his uncle's gambling habits.
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian physicist who created the world's first nuclear reactor.
The MANIAC I was an early computer built under the direction of Nicholas Metropolis at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. It was based on the von Neumann architecture of the IAS, developed by John von Neumann. As with almost all computers of its era, it was a one-of-a-kind machine that could not exchange programs with other computers. Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly acronyms for machine names, although von Neumann may have suggested the name to him.
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was a Greek-American physicist.
Martin David Kruskal was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and from nonlinear analysis to asymptotic analysis. His most celebrated contribution was in the theory of solitons.
John Robert Pasta was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physicists and researchers in the fields of dynamical systems and chaos theory, and as the head of the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1964 to 1970.
In physics, the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou (FPUT) problem or formerly the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem was the apparent paradox in chaos theory that many complicated enough physical systems exhibited almost exactly periodic behavior – called Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou recurrence – instead of the expected ergodic behavior. This came as a surprise, as Enrico Fermi, certainly, expected the system to thermalize in a fairly short time. That is, it was expected for all vibrational modes to eventually appear with equal strength, as per the equipartition theorem, or, more generally, the ergodic hypothesis. Yet here was a system that appeared to evade the ergodic hypothesis. Although the recurrence is easily observed, it eventually became apparent that over much, much longer time periods, the system does eventually thermalize. Multiple competing theories have been proposed to explain the behavior of the system, and it remains a topic of active research.
The Monte Carlo trolley, or FERMIAC, was an analog computer invented by physicist Enrico Fermi to aid in his studies of neutron transport.
In mathematics, Kummer sum is the name given to certain cubic Gauss sums for a prime modulus p, with p congruent to 1 modulo 3. They are named after Ernst Kummer, who made a conjecture about the statistical properties of their arguments, as complex numbers. These sums were known and used before Kummer, in the theory of cyclotomy.
The following timeline starts with the invention of the modern computer in the late interwar period.
The following is a timeline of scientific computing, also known as computational science.
The following is a timeline of numerical analysis after 1945, and deals with developments after the invention of the modern electronic computer, which began during Second World War. For a fuller history of the subject before this period, see timeline and history of mathematics.
This is a timeline of key developments in computational mathematics.
Panayotis G. Kevrekidis is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kevrekidis earned his B.Sc. in physics in 1996 from the University of Athens. He obtained his M.S. in 1998 and his MPhil and Ph.D. in 2000 from Rutgers University, the latter under the joint supervision of Joel Lebowitz and Panos G. Georgopoulos. His thesis was entitled “Lattice Dynamics of Solitary Wave Excitations”. He then assumed a post-doctoral position split between the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics of Princeton University (10/2000–02/2001) and the Theoretical Division and the Center for Nonlinear Studies of Los Alamos National Laboratory (03/2001–08/2001). From 09/2001, he joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an assistant professor. He was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor in 06/2005. As of 09/2010, he is a full professor at the same institution. He is presently the Stanislaw M. Ulam Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
David Kelly Campbell is an American theoretical physicist and academic leader. His research has spanned high energy physics, condensed matter physics and nonlinear dynamics. He also served as Physics Department Head at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Dean of the College Engineering at Boston University, and Boston University Provost.
Sergej Flach is a theoretical physicist whose research has spanned a number of scientific fields in his career. With about 240 publications to his name, his research has been cited over 16,000 times giving him an h-index of 58 and i10-index of 174. He is a member of the American Physical Society, German Physical Society, Korean Physical Society, and New Zealand Institute of Physics. He is an editorial board member of Chaos (2016-) and was an editorial board member of Physical Review E (2009–2011).
Mary Ann Mansigh Karlsen is a computer programmer who was active in the 1950s in the use of scientific computers.
