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With Claire grown and out of the nest, Stan officially retired from Los Alamos in 1967 and launched a retirement career that kept him busier than ever with new university duties, invitations, meetings, lectures, and extended stays in Santa Fe, where we had bought a house.

At the University of Colorado his goal had been to awaken the academic mathematical community to the great potential of the computer age and to "what physics and biology could do for mathematics," his paraphrase of the famous Kennedy statement. In Boulder he wore three hats: Head of the mathematics department (with an assistant chairman to run the daily departmental affairs); professor in the computing center; and professor in the biology department of the medical school where he lectured occasionally on the speculations and mathematical explorations of neurophysiology and the workings of the brain, which had replaced the attention he had devoted earlier to physics and astrophysics.

In his academic spare time at our Santa Fe pied-à-tierre he continued to use the admirable Los Alamos computing facilities as a dollar-a-year consultant. But he was sorely missing those of his peers who had died before their time, and beginning to feel removed from the younger generation of scientists who arrived during our absences. To counter that, when he retired from Boulder he established a loose connection with the University of Florida as Visiting Graduate Research Professor of Mathematics which remained in effect to the end. In Gainesville he concentrated on giving colloquia and seminars on new mathematical problems he very much wanted to assemble into a new volume of problems. The book was beginning to take shape when he died. Mauldin, his collaborator on the project, has since published an abbreviated version in a mathematical journal.

Invitations to lecture were growing exponentially. If he had accepted them all he would have become like Erdös, an itinerant performer. Claiming he was "nonbiodegradable," in the first six months of 1978, in addition to extended stays in Santa Fe and Gainesville, Stan gave talks in Paris, Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Washington, Denver, Santa Barbara, Paris again, and Warsaw, priding himself that he never exactly repeated his talks. On the road he experienced a charge of adrenalin. A certain letdown came after the return home: catching up with mail and other obligations, fatigue, increasingly frequent digestive upsets. Towards the very end the strain was beginning to tell.

Then, on May 13, 1984, at the age of 75, while, in Erdös' words, "still able to prove and conjecture," on a day he had contentedly returned home from London, Stan had an unexpected seizure, collapsed, and died. This spared him the disintegration he feared, and much as I still miss him, it also spared me the distress of watching him grow old. In his usual way of making light of serious matters to render them more palatable, he used to say "the best way to die is of a sudden heart attack or to be shot by a jealous husband." He had the good fortune of succombing to the first, though I believe he might have preferred the second.

In a brief memorial eulogy David Hawkins said: "People who do not much live cannot much die. Stan lived very much. Those who live richly have many linkages to the world… Their lives are woven into the world's fabric, its lattice of associations. When they leave there is a big hole in the lattice, a tear in the fabric. These holes or tears remain… and that simple fact is the human source of all our concerns for immortality."

Françoise Ulam

Santa Fe, 1990

Selected bibliography

Books

BY S. M. Ulam

Collection of Mathematical Problems. New York: Interscience, 1960.

Sets, Numbers and Universes. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1974.

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY S. M. ULAM

The Scottish Book: A Collection of Problems. Translated from a notebook kept at the Scottish Coffee House for the use of the Lwów Section, Polish Mathematical Society. Los Alamos, N. Mex.: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1957.

BY MARK KAC AND S. M. ULAM

Mathematics and Logic. New York: Praeger, 1968.

Articles

BY S. M. ULAM

"Combinatorial Analysis in Infinite Sets and Some Physical Theories." Review of Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics, vol. 6 (1964), pp. 343–355.

"Gamow and Mathematics." In Gamow Memorial Volume. Boulder, Colo.: University of Colorado Press, 1972.

"Ideas of Space and Space Time." Rehovoth, Israeclass="underline" Weizmann Institute, winter 1972–73.

"Infinities." In The Copernican Volume of the National Academy of Sciences, Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1974.

"John von Neumann, 1903–1957." Bulletin of American Mathematical Society, vol. 64, no. 3, pt. 2 (1958), pp. 1–49.

"On the Monte Carlo Method." In Proceedings, Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machines, September 1949. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951.

"Some Ideas and Prospects in Biomathematics." Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering, vol. 1 (1972), pp. 227–292.

BY P. R. STEIN AND S. M. ULAM

"Experiments in Chess on Electronic Computing Machines." Computers and Automation, vol. 6, no. 9 (1957), pp. 14–18.

Index

Abel, Niels Henrik, 207

AEC, see Atomic Energy Commission

Agnew, Harold, 192

Air Force Space Committee, 255, 256

Alembert, Jean d', 272

Alexander, James, 70, 244

Alexandroff, Paul, 46, 66, 68

Alvarez, Luis W., 211

Anderson, Senator Clinton P., 72, 254

Archibald, Raymond C., 100

Archimedes, 104, 274, 290

Argo, Harold and Mary, 153

Aron, Françoise, see Ulam, Françoise

Aronszajn, Nachman, 36

astronomy, cosmology, 16 ff, 203 ff, 221, 255, 258, 299

Atkinson, Geoffrey S., 149

atomic bomb, 5, 142, 146, 149 f, 152, 159, 170, 188 f, 209, 211, 221 f

atomic energy, 189, 237;