Stanisław Ulam

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, American mathematician, born: April 13, 1909, Lemberg, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), died: May 13, 1984, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

Stan Ulam is also important in the early history of nuclear weapons. It was Ulam who showed Edward Teller's early model of the Hydrogen Bomb to be inadequate.

Ulam then went on to devise a better method himself. He was the first one to realize that you could place all the of H-bomb's components inside one casing, put a fission bomb at one end and thermonuclear material at the other, and use shock waves from the exploding fisson bomb to create compression of a kind man had never known before, that would detonate the thermonuclear material.

Teller resisted this idea at first, then saw its merit, and suggested the use of radiation rather than shock waves. "Radiation implosion," as the method came to be called, has been the standard method of creating H-bombs ever since.