Nicholas Metropolis (nonfiction)

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis.

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (Greek: Νικόλαος Μητρόπουλος) (11 June 1915 – 17 October 1999) was a Greek-American physicist.

Biography

Metropolis received his BSc (1937) and PhD (1941) degrees in physics at the University of Chicago. Shortly afterwards, Robert Oppenheimer recruited him from Chicago, where he was at the time collaborating with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on the first nuclear reactors, to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He arrived in Los Alamos in April 1943, as a member of the original staff of fifty scientists.

After World War II, he returned to the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor. He came back to Los Alamos in 1948 to lead the group in the Theoretical Division that designed and built the MANIAC I computer in 1952 that was modeled on the IAS machine, and the MANIAC II in 1957. (He chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of such acronyms for machine names, but may have, instead, only further stimulated such use.)

At Los Alamos, in the 1950s, a group of researchers led by Metropolis, including John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam, developed the Monte Carlo method. Generally speaking, the Monte Carlo method is a statistical approach to solve deterministic many-body problems.

In 1953 Metropolis co-authored the first paper on a technique that was central to the method now known as simulated annealing. This landmark paper showed the first numerical simulations of a liquid.

From 1957 to 1965 he was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and was the founding Director of its Institute for Computer Research. In 1965 he returned to Los Alamos where he was made a Laboratory Senior Fellow in 1980.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against physical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Enrico Fermi (nonfiction)
• Physics (nonfiction)
• Edward Teller (nonfiction)
• Stanislaw Ulam (nonfiction)

External links

• Nicholas Metropolis @ Wikipedia