"[I]t was seeing the gist, the inner core of a problem, that enabled him to open so many new roads—roads that often led to new branches of mathematics. ...Cellular automata theory, which he proposed to von Neumann; the of solving intractable problems, not only in probability theory but in areas such as number theory where the method would not have been thought applicable; and his work on nonlinear processes that anticipated today's interest in solitons and "chaos." We still do not know—it remains a government secret—what jumped into Ulam's head that made it possible for Edward Teller to build the H-bomb."
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Academics from the United StatesInventorsAgnostics from the United StatesAcademics from PolandMathematicians from Poland
Original Language: English
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Martin Gardner, Preface, Science, Computers, and People: From the Tree of Mathematics (1986) by Stanislaw M. Ulam.
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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