Ulam was struck by a sudden and severe case of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, that nearly killed him.
Ulam played with all 52 cards where each arrangement created a unique game, so the total number of possible games was 52 factorial,
Ulam later remarked, "It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard
And this is why Ulam wanted to understand how the neutrons behave.
But then Ulam had a flash of insight, what if I just play hundreds of games and count how many could be won?
- But when Ulam returned to work, he had a sudden revelation.
So as Ulam had a heavy gambling uncle, they nicknamed it the Monte Carlo method.
This is Ulam right here on the right.
And thatís Stan Ulam who really the Monte Carlos sort of named after.
And Stan Ulam and Francois who both, you know, they both lost their entire families to the holocaust in Europe and escaped to the United States.
And Klara and Francois Ulam , Claire Ulam , whoís still alive, Stan Ulam her dad who was from Poland, Johnny and the Ulam ís, so all these people let me into their basements
and the Ulam ís sort of filing cabinet.
And it's called an Ulam spiral.
The game today is called ulama.
Now, Ulam 's uncle was a gambler, and the random sampling and high stakes reminded Ulam of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, and the name stuck.
years, or Stan Ulam , the Polish mathematician who designed the hydrogen bomb.
So in 1963, Stanislav Ulam , who was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century,
And it's one of the fields that he and Ulam invented I'm just going to finish off talking about now which hopefully is right up your street because it talks about
We're going to Mexico next month to film ulama.
- Even after the war ended, Ulam continued trying to figure out how neutrons behave inside a nuclear bomb.
His recovery was long and slow, with Ulam spending most of his time in beds.
- With it, von Neumann and Ulam had a statistical way to figure out how many neutrons were produced without having to do any exact calculations.
When playing Solitaire, how did Ulam know his cards were perfectly shuffled?
But it was just too complicated actually working out how to build it in the real world so Ulam who, as we've seen, loves grids and things
including people like J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, and a little known mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam .
And actually, one of John von Neumann's colleagues, called Stanislaw Ulam , was interested in these kind of questions.
Thatís Joseph Stalin with the bomb, Oppenheimer looking like a saint, whether he was or not and Stan Ulam spitting, Edward Teller in the middle and George Kamov pulling the tail of