Ulam, a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis as so many of his friends did not, is not well known to the general public. He invented the “Monte Carlo” methods for calculating probabilities while playing solitaire at Los Alamos during World War II. Von Neumann programmed the original ENIAC computer to carry out Monte Carlo simulations. Ulam was also one of the “fathers” of the hydrogen bomb, figuring out a way to use the energy released by two atomic bombs to squeeze liquid hydrogen with sufficient vigor to create a fusion reaction. Edward Teller improved on Ulam’s idea and claimed all the credit for himself and also helped to undermine Robert Oppenheimer for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about the “super.” Ulam disliked both Oppenheimer’s moral prissiness and Teller’s right-wing aggression.
Ulam’s book is perhaps more interesting because he was not really a writer. His wife Françoise was the real author, pursuing her husband to speak at length of his life, which she pulled together into a coherent narrative. Ulam appears to have been a remarkable blend of brilliance, self-confidence, and caution. He frequently remarks of other mathematicians that they lacked the ultimate level of self-confidence needed to achieve unalloyed greatness—mathematicians, as one might expect, tended to demand unalloyed greatness in their heroes. He himself had a great deal of self-confidence—he remarks that, like Homer’s heroes, he always enjoyed boasting—but he rarely published papers as sole author. He enjoyed being the “idea” man, with an assistant to handle the details. Ulam also said that he couldn’t stand to reread his papers, always sure that a second look would convince him that he hadn’t achieved anything remarkable.
Ulam doesn’t conceal the fact that creating the atomic bomb was the absolute high point of his life—for many of its participants, Los Alamos came closer to Plato’s Academy than any mere college or university, even better than the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Princeton lacked the desert landscapes and brilliant, starry nights that fascinated so many of the eastern dudes. Above all, of course, was the surging intellectual urgency to thrust man’s hand deeper into the heart of Nature than had ever been done before.
Ulam and his fellow geniuses were very fond of jokes, and it’s remarkable how easily they were amused. Von Neumann thought it was funny to read stop signs in reverse—“pots!” or “otla!” if they were in Mexico. Their gags were often both obvious and verbose—if Enrico Fermi lost at tennis 4-6 he would say, “It doesn’t count, since the difference was less than the square root of the sum of the games” [2a remarkably unfunny exchange between Richard Feynman and Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind over “ham” and “baloney” sandwiches. Since men like Ulam and Von Neumann were usually adept in three or four, or five or six, languages, it’s remarkable how tone-deaf they could be. They liked to be able to see the joke coming, which is more or less the opposite of what a “real” joke should be.
Ulam and his friends liked to swap Middle European Jew jokes, which are probably funnier to a Middle European Jew. The only one that I liked, and it’s not brilliant, is about the Viennese school boy who comes home to tell his father that he got an “F” on his history final. “How could that happen? What did they ask you?” “There was one question: describe the past, present, and future of the Austrian Empire.” “What was your answer?” “Nebech [Yiddish for “fool” or “folly”], nebech, nebech.” How could you get an ‘F’?” “I spelled ‘nebech’ with two ‘b’s’!” Okay, not hysterical, but you could see how it would make Jews laugh. Ulam and Von Neumann would give a boring lecture “two nebechs.” Since the Austrian Empire itself only got three, even one nebech was pretty bad.
