Adventures of a mathematician: S. M. Ulam, Scribner's, New York, 1976, 317 pp.

✍ Scribed by Gian-Carlo Rota

• Book ID: 102623163
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 124 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0001-8708
• DOI: 10.1016/0001-8708(77)90092-5

✦ Synopsis

I met Stan Ulam in 1964, at a lecture I was giving in New York. Kac had prevailed on his reluctance to sit for an hour in front of anything but a coffee table in a sidewalk cafe. After twenty minutes he remembered "an urgent appointment downtown" and walked out. Years later I was to learn that ten, not twenty minutes is his normal limit for a lecture. Once the idea has come across, he reasons, it is more fun to work out the details by yourself; and if the main idea has not been put forward in the first ten minutes, then the lecture is probably not worth your time.

This one-shot quality of Ulam's thought became more apparent after I arrived in Los Alamos. "Any good idea can be stated in fifty words or less," he announced with a twinge of challenge in his voice. I am probably the only student of physics to be taught in twenty-word sentences unevenly spaced throughout the working day, and at later dinner parties, each one an irritatingly clear summary of one or more chapters of the Hand&h dm Physik.