The plane landed at Albuquerque. I took my bags, walked a hundred yards across a parking area, and climbed into the small plane that commuted several times a day between Albuquerque and a single runway at an altitude of 7300 feet on the Los Alamos mesa.
Von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the first half of the twentieth century, was the person who had been responsible for my coming to this country in 1936. We had corresponded since 1934 about some abstruse questions of pure mathematics. It was in this field that I early made a name for myself; von Neumann, working in similar areas, invited me to visit the newly established Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton — a place well known to the general public because one of its first professors was Albert Einstein. Von Neumann himself was one of the youngest professors at Princeton. He was already famous for his work in the foundations of mathematics and logic. Years later, he was to become one of the pioneers in the development of electronic computers.
At one time I had undertaken to write a book on von Neumann's scientific life. In trying to plan it, I thought of how I, along with many others, had been influenced by him; and how this man, and some others I knew, working in the purely abstract realm of mathematics and theoretical physics had changed aspects of the world as we now know it.
Memories of my own work in science, of my studies and early research, of the endless hours spent in cafés in my home town discussing mathematics with fellow mathematicians, of my coming to the United States, lecturing at Princeton and Harvard, became interwoven in an inextricable way with recollections of von Neumann's life and later events.
When I started to organize my thoughts, I realized that up to that time — it was about 1966, I think — there existed few descriptions of the unusual climate in which the birth of the atomic age took place. Official histories do not give the real motivations or go into the inner feelings, doubts, convictions, determination, and hopes of the individuals who for over two years lived under unusual conditions. A set of flat pictures, they give at best only the essential facts.
Thinking of all this in the little plane from Albuquerque to Los Alamos, I remembered how Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had influenced me in my childhood in the books I read in Polish translation. Even in my boyish dreams, I did not imagine that some day I would take part in equally fantastic undertakings.
The result of all these reflections was that instead of writing a life of von Neumann, I have undertaken to describe my personal history, as well as what I know of a number of other scientists who also became involved in the great technological achievements of this age.
As I have already mentioned, I began as a pure mathematician. In Los Alamos I met physicists and other "natural" scientists, and consorted mainly, if not exclusively, with theoreticians. It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.
I became involved in the work on the atomic bomb, then in the work on the hydrogen bomb, but most of my life has been spent in more theoretical realms. My friend Otto Frisch, the discoverer of the possibility of chain reactions from fission, in an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing his first impressions of Los Alamos upon arriving there from embattled Britain, wrote:
"Certainly I have never found such a concentration of interesting people in one place. In the evening I felt I could walk into any house at random and would find congenial people engaged in music making or in stimulating debate…. I also met Stan Ulam early on, a brilliant Polish topologist with a charming French wife. At once he told me that he was a pure mathematician who had sunk so low that his latest paper actually contained numbers with decimal points!"
Little has been written about the lives of the people responsible for so much in science and in the birth of the nuclear age and the space age: von Neumann, Fermi, and numerous other mathematicians and physicists. But here I want to recount also the more abstract and philosophically decisive influences which came from mathematics itself. Names like Stefan Banach, G. D. Birkhoff, and David Hilbert are virtually unknown to the general public, and yet it is these men, along with Einstein, Fermi and a few others equally famous, who were indispensable to what twentieth-century science has accomplished.
Part I: Becoming a Mathematician in Poland
Chapter 1. Childhood
My father, Jozef Ulam, was a lawyer. He was born in Lwów, Poland, in 1877. At the time of his birth the city was the capital of the province of Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When I was born in 1909 this was still true.
His father, my grandfather, was an architect and a building contractor. I understand that my great-grandfather had come to Lwów from Venice.
My mother, Anna Auerbach, was born in Stryj, a small town some sixty miles south of Lwów, near the Carpathian Mountains. Her father was an industrialist who dealt in steel and represented factories in Galicia and Hungary.
One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a window sill with my father and looking out at a street on which there was a great parade honoring the Crown Prince, who was visiting Lwów. I was not quite three years old.
I remember when my sister was born. I was told a little girl had arrived, and I felt — it is hard to describe — somehow grown up. I was three.
When I was four, I remember jumping around on an oriental rug looking down at its intricate patterns. I remember my father's towering figure standing beside me, and I noticed that he smiled. I felt, "He smiles because he thinks I am childish, but I know these are curious patterns." I did not think in those very words, but I am pretty certain that it was not a thought that came to me later. I definitely felt, "I know something my father does not know. Perhaps I know better than my father."
I also have the memory of a trip to Venice with the family. We were on a vaporetto on a canal, and I had a balloon which fell overboard. As it bobbed along the side of the boat, my father tried to fish it out with the crooked end of his walking stick but failed. I was consoled by being allowed to select a souvenir model of a gondola made of Venetian beads and still remember the feeling of pride at being given such a task.
I remember the beginning of the first World War. As a boy, I was a Central Powers patriot when Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria — the "Central Powers" — were fighting against France, England, Russia, and Italy. Most of the Polish-speaking people were nationalistic and anti-Austrian, but nevertheless, at about the age of eight I wrote a little poem about the great victories of the Austrian and German armies.
Early in 1914, the Russian troops advanced into Galicia and occupied Lwów. My family left, taking refuge in Vienna. There I learned German, but my native language — the language we spoke at home — was Polish.
We lived in a hotel across from St. Stephen's cathedral. The strange thing is that even though I visited Vienna many times afterwards, I did not actually recognize this building again until one day in 1966 while I was walking through the streets with my wife. Perhaps because we were talking about my childhood I suddenly remembered it and pointed it out to her. With this a number of other memories buried for over fifty years surfaced.
On the same visit, while walking through the Prater gardens, the sight of an outdoor café suddenly brought back the memory of how I had once choked in the wind with a sort of asthmatic reaction in front of that very café—a feeling that I was not to experience again until many years later in Madison, Wisconsin. Curiously the subsequent sensation did not make me recall the childhood episode. It is only when I was at that very spot many years later that this sensory memory returned as a result of the visual association.