Anyone who has worked in a large organization, with an over-loaded Administration Division, will sympathise with the actions of two scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in issuing a spoof Memorandum. They had become frustrated with the large number of mimeographed notes circulated by Administration and Services, or A&S, “to keep laboratory members abreast of the latest developments”. So, one December day in 1947, they drew up a table of the numbers from 1 to 100, listed in alphabetical order, labelled it A&S Memorandum No. 10742 and circulated it.
Their action caused quite a stir, with some senior managers calling for “heads to roll”. However, when the memo eventually reached the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Washington, it was greeted with great mirth, one Commissioner describing it as “the best thing to come out of Los Alamos yet.”
The “Culprits”
It emerged later that the memo was written by J Carson Mark, Leader of T Division and Stanislaw Ulam, Group Leader. They admitted that the number list had been prepared in haste, and contained two “flaws”: it began with the number 12 (a dozen), and they had completely forgotten to include the number 10.
Stanislaw Ulam, born in Poland in 1909, was a member of the remarkable Lvov School of Mathematics, which flourished in that city (now Lviv) between the two world wars (see That’s Maths Posts, ref below). Starting with the publication of his first paper as a student in 1929, Ulam studied many fields of mathematics, including set theory, topology, group theory, number theory and graph theory. He published more than 150 mathematical papers.
In 1935, John von Neumann invited Ulam to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1944, Ulam started work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He played a critical role in the development of the H-bomb, remaining at Los Alamos after the war.
Ulam was one of the first to realise that, with electronic computers, statistical methods can yield answers to many otherwise intractable problems. He devised a system of computation using random numbers. Through an analogy with gambling, this computational technique was named the Monte Carlo method. The method is now a standard technique in numerical science.
Carson Mark
J. Carson Mark, born in Ontario, Canada in 1913, was was a mathematician best known for his work on nuclear weapons. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1945 onwards, becoming leader of the Theoretical Division in 1947, a position he held for twenty-five years.
When Stanislaw Ulam finally came up with a workable design for a thermonuclear weapon, he approached Mark. There were serious inter-personal conflicts and rivalries at the laboratory but, with his great human and managerial skills, Mark managed to persuade a group of brilliant but difficult scientists to collaborate effectively. Mark continued to live in Los Alamos until his death in 1997. Ulam had died suddenly in 1984, aged 75.
Sources
ThatsMaths 