"Teller’s calculations were faulty; his prototype would have been a dud. This was first noticed by Stanislaw Ulam... Having shown that the Teller scheme was a nonstarter, Ulam produced, in his typically absent-minded fashion, a workable alternative. “I found him at home at noon staring intensely out of a window with a very strange expression on his face,” Ulam’s wife recalled. “I can never forget his faraway look as peering unseeing in the garden, he said in a thin voice—I can still hear it—‘I found a way to make it work.’”"
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Academics from the United StatesInventorsAgnostics from the United StatesAcademics from PolandMathematicians from Poland
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quoted in Jim Holt|language=en|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/how-computers-exploded/|access-date=2023-10-31|issn=0028-7504}}
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam
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Stanislaw Ulam
Stanisław Marcin Ulam (April 13, 1909 – May 13, 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project and proposed the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. He also invented nuclear pulse propulsion and developed a number of mathematical tools in number theory, set theory, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
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