Re: Fermi reference

["Michael Stabin" <michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu>]

Jim D. wrote:



> Stan Ulam in his autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician, Scribners,

1976,

> writes that shortly after his return to Los Alamos, probably in 1946 or

47, he

> gave two seminars that



I'm getting the feeling that this great finding was indeed only given as a

presentation, never officially published. Will see if anything else shows

up. H. Zaidi, who cites it in his 1999 Medical Physics paper on uses of

Monte Carlo in nuclear medicine, is also searching. If I do get a good

reference, I'll post it to the list.



> The classical experiment on approximating the value

> of [pi] by dropping needles on a sheet of paper with parallel lines is

described

> in an eighteen-century paper by Buffon



Yes, I'm familiar with this. I read that Buffon first toyed with this idea

by tossing French breadsticks over his shoulder and studying their

orientations on the lines on the tile floor on which they landed.



Joe P wrote:



>Maybe one can find the MCNP users manual in libraries, but I think its

distribution is somewhat limited.   There are other books on Monte Carlo

modelling available, usually in math and/or physics sections of technical

libraries.  Hey, why not do a search on the Internet???



I'm a regular MCNP user. The code, as you suggest, is available from RSICC

(now called the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center, at

http://www-rsicc.ornl.gov/rsic.html). The code is $700 if you're government,

educational, or non profit, $1150 if private, and $1900 if non-US. The code

manual does not have a great history of Monte Carlo that I found. I did

scour the internet and the Vanderbilt library for this before hitting the

list with the request. I found many references to this statement, but not a

solid literature reference, including in a volume of "collected papers" of

Fermi or several books by Ulam.



Mike





Michael G. Stabin, PhD, CHP

Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences

Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences

Vanderbilt University

1161 21st Avenue South

Nashville, TN 37232-2675

Phone (615) 322-3190

Fax   (615) 322-3764

e-mail  michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu







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