Adventures of a Mathematician

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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.

This remark of Stanislaw Ulam’s is particularly appropriate to his own career. Our world is very different today because of Ulam’s contributions in mathematics, physics, computer science, and the design of nuclear weapons.

While still a schoolboy in Lwów, then a city in Poland, he signed his notebook “S. Ulam, astronomer, physicist and mathematician.” Of these early interests perhaps it was natural that the talented young Ulam would eventually be attracted to mathematics; it is in this science that Poland has made its most distinguished intellectual contributions in this century. Ulam was fortunate to have been born into a wealthy Jewish family of lawyers, businessmen, and bankers who provided the necessary resources for him to follow his intellectual instincts and his early talent for mathematics. Eventually Ulam graduated with a doctorate in pure mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute at Lwów in 1933. As Ulam notes, the aesthetic appeal of pure mathematics lies not merely in the rigorous logic of the proofs and theorems, but also in the poetic elegance and economy in articulating each step in a mathematical presentation. This very fundamental and aristocratic form of mathematics was the concern of the school of Polish mathematicians in Lwów during Ulam’s early years.

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