History: N. Metropolis, computer pioneer

["Mike Grissom" <mpg1@coastside.net>]

radsafe'ers,

The following was in the 10/24/99 San Jose Mercury News (with a New
York Times byline, by Nick Ravo):

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N. Metropolis,
computer pioneer

Was member of initial Manhattan Project team

Nicholas C. Metropolis, a mathematician who was one of the initial
team of scientists involved with the Manhattan Project and who later
became a pioneer in computer science, died last Sunday at a nursing
home in Los Alamos, New Mexico [USA]. He was 84.

Mr. Metropolis was best known for his contributions to the Monte Carlo
mathematical method, which applies the laws of probability to scientific
research. From 1948 to 1952, he also used the stored program - a
principle that outlines the internal organization of a computer - to develop
one of the first high-speed electronic digital computers, which he named
Maniac, for mathematical and numerical integrator and computer. The
principle was developed by a colleague, the mathematician John von
Neumann.

"Nick's work in mathematics and the beginnings of computer science
forms the basis for nearly everything the laboratory has done in
computing and simulation science," said John C. Browne, director of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Mr. Metropolis was a senior
fellow emeritus.

Mr. Metropolis was born June 11, 1915, in Chicago. He earned a
bachelor's degree and a doctorate in experimental physics from the
University of Chicago, where he collaborated with Enrico Fermi and
Edward Teller on the earliest nuclear reactors.

In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited him to Los Alamos for the
Manhattan Project, the United States' wartime effort to build the first
atomic bomb. His first assignment was to develop equations for the
state of materials at high temperatures, pressures and densities.

After the war, Mr. Metropolis taught at the University of Chicago. In
1948, he returned to Los Alamos to lead the group that built Maniac
and Maniac II. He went back to the University of Chicago in 1957 and
founded the Institute for Computer Research. In 1965, he returned to
Los Alamos once again.

Mr. Metropolis became a senior fellow of the laboratory in 1980 and
in 1987 became the first Los Alamos employee given emeritus status
by the University of California, which had operated the laboratory since
its creation in 1943.

-----


Michael P. Grissom
Email:  mikeg@slac.stanford.edu
Email:  mpg1@coastside.net



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