Adventures of a Mathematician

^{Designated by numbers: (1) Leon Chwistek, (2) Stefan Banach, (3) Stanislaw Loria, (4) Kazimir Kuratowski, (5) Stefan Kaczmarz, (6) Juliusz Schauder, (7) Marceli Stark, (8) Karol Borsuk, (9) Edward Marczewski, (10) S. M. Ulam, (11) A. Zawadzki, (12) Edward Otto, (13) W. Zonn, (14) M. Puchalik, (15) K. Szpunar}

 

^{On the dock at Gdynia before Stan and his younger brother, Adam, embarked for America in 1939. The four Ulams are (left to right) Jozef (father), Adam, Szymon (uncle), and Stan.}

 

^{John von Neumann, Princeton, 1932}

 

^{The Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, 1938}

^{Left to right, seated: George Homans, Jim Fisk, Paul Samuelson, John Snyder, James Miller, Ivan Getting, Willard Quine, Robert Woodward, George Hass}

^{Standing, first row: James Baker, Kenneth Murdock, Paul Ward, George Haskins, L. J. Henderson, John Ferry, George Hanfmann, Charles Curtiss, Alfred North Whitehead, John Livingston Lowes, Talbot Waterman, Tom Chambers, Samuel Eliot Morison, John Miller, Conrad Arensberg, David Griggs, William Whyte}

^{Back row: F. Edward Cranz, Reed Rollins, Harry Levin, Frederick Watkins, John Oxtoby, E. Bright Wilson, Richard Howard, Albert Lord, Garrett Birkhoff, Craig LaDrière, Stan Ulam, Orville Bailey (Harvard University)}

 

^{Ulam and C. J. Everett in front of North Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1941}

 

 

^{Enrico Fermi in the 1940s (Harold Agnew)}

 

^{Nobel prizewinners Ernest O. Lawrence, Fermi, and I. I. Rabi, during a meeting at the Lodge, Los Alamos, in the late 1940s}

 

^{Lunch at the Lodge; (clockwise from right) Richard Feynman, Carson Mark, Jack Clark, Fermi}

 

^{Von Neumann, Feynman, and Ulam on the porch of Bandelier Lodge in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico, during a picnic, ca 1949 (Nicholas Metropolis)}

 

^{Tennis at Los Alamos, 1958; (left to right) James Tuck, Ulam, Conrad Longmire, Donald Dodder (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory)}

 

^{Claire Ulam, aged one, with her father, 1945}

 

^{Ulam standing on the piece of land in Santa Fe that he bought for $150 in 1947}

 

^{The von Neumanns starting the descent into the Grand Canyon on an excursion in the late 1940s: Klari, with visor, is fourth from front; Johnny, bareheaded and in city suit, is last, on the only mule facing the wrong way}

 

^{On the Plaza in Santa Fe, ca 1949, von Neumann and his eleven-year-old daughter, Marina}

 

^{Johnny, Claire, and Stan in the Ulam yard at Los Alamos, ca 1954}

 

^{George Gamow's representation of the ''super" directing committee; (bottom; left to right): Ulam, Edward Teller, Gamow; Joseph Stalin and J. Robert Oppenheimer observe proceedings from above (The Viking Press)}

 

^{"Demonstrating" the MANIAC to Claire at a laboratory open house, 1955 (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory)}

 

^{Ulam foiled by the technological problem of fitting Theodore von Kárman with the neck cord of a microphone (Max Spring, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory)}

 

^{An informal moment during a presidential visit, Los Alamos, 1962; (left to right) Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, President John F. Kennedy, Senator Clinton P. Anderson, mathematician Ulam, Congressman Joseph M. Montoya, science advisor Jerry Wiesner (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory)}

 

^{Ulam and Life Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt near the Los Alamos laboratory, 1962 (William H. Regan, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory)}

 

^{Stan and Françoise Ulam at home in Los Alamos, 1964 (Lloyd Shearer)}

Postscript to Adventures by Françoise Ulam

Françoise Ulam

When Scribner's urged Stan to write his memoirs he agreed to give it a try and in 1972 he took a sabbatical from the University of Colorado to devote himself to the task. For a year, while we traveled to the East and to Paris, he dictated reminiscences which I tape-recorded and transcribed. Back in Boulder, Stan returned to his university duties and I edited and assembled the giant jigsaw puzzle the transcripts had become, until there was a draft for him to look at and add a few connecting sentences here and there. The book appeared in 1976 under the title Adventures of a Mathematician. (Stan wanted to change the title to ''Misadventures," but on that he was overruled.)

"Adventures" is Stan, pure Stan, all Stan — even though he hardly wrote a line of it — for I scrupulously refrained from injecting myself into it. It is about his professional life and the scientific times he lived in. Its tone is personal but not intimate, factual more than analytical. In the spirit of the book, I want to complement his story with a few impressions, perceptions, and memories of my own, to weave along a loose thread of time my gradual discovery of the man he was and the life into which he transported me.

Stan and I met in Cambridge at the home of a mutual Polish friend. I was a French exchange student of literature at Mount Holyoke College; he was already a rather well-known young Polish mathematician and a lecturer at Harvard. In the college style of the times, it was "Holyoke graduate student meets Harvard professor." But the year was 1939 and World War II was engulfing Europe. Castaways from the ruins of the Old World, we were brought together on the shores of the New. I knew at once that he was someone quite out of the ordinary, and he became the focus of my life. In return he gave me a front row seat to his all-absorbing world of science and scientists. And what a world that turned out to be. We were married in 1941 in Wisconsin and we lived in New Mexico the better part of our lives.

What had first attracted me to Stan was that, like all educated Poles, he was a Francophile and spoke a fluent French rolling with Slavic r's, and that even during these anxious times in the darkest days of the war, he seemed to have absolute self-confidence and unflinching optimism. He was sure the Allies would win, though the question of when remained. I was also dazzled by the breadth of his culture and his encyclopedic memory.

With his unusual looks and magnetic green eyes, he always seemed to stand out in a crowd. I remember a party years later when Georgia O'Keefe pointed an imperious finger in his direction and exclaimed, "Who is that man?"

"That man" was a maverick, a study in contrasts and contradictions, a proud Pole who did not kowtow to anyone and an assimilated, agnostic Jew very conscious of his ethnicity. This translated later into his becoming very involved with a Polish-American cultural organization, the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation, and with the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science, the only boards he ever enjoyed actively serving on. And he was also, like many Slavs, improvident and unorganized. He readily left all practical matters to me in the management of our daily life. He loved to be with people and entertain them with his quick wit and inexhaustible fund of Jewish jokes, but he was also insular and insulated, at times sensitive or insensitive, perceptive or imperceptive of others. Someone once jokingly told him that he suffered from "le complexe du roi" with his disregard of the rules of ordinary life. Last but not least, he had the build of an athlete and healthy, earthy appetites. He also claimed he did not know the meaning of the word tired, and although he enjoyed tennis and had played soccer in Poland, he liked to attribute his good health to his disdain for exercise. What he exercised all the time was his mind.