Nicholas Metropolis

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Nicholas Metropolis
Born
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis

(1915-06-11)June 11, 1915
Chicago, Illinois, United States
DiedOctober 17, 1999(1999-10-17) (aged 84)
Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Chicago
Known for
AwardsComputer Pioneer Award (1984)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist, Mathematician
InstitutionsLos Alamos National Laboratory

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (Greek: Νικόλαος Μητρόπουλος;[1] June 11, 1915 – October 17, 1999) was a Greek-American physicist.[2]

Metropolis received his BSc (1937) and PhD in physics (1941, with

Robert Oppenheimer recruited him from Chicago, where he was 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. 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.

Early life and education

Nicolas Metropolis was born on June 11, 1915, in Chicago, US. Metropolis received his BSc (1936) and PhD in chemical physics (1941) at the

Harold C. Urey's group. Later he joined University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and worked under Edward Teller's supervision, who encouraged him to move into theoretical physics. At Los Alamos Metropolis worked together with Richard Feynman on "electromechanical devices used for hand computations".[3]

After World War II

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. (John von Neumann thought this acronym too frivolous;[4] Metropolis claims to have chosen the name "MANIAC" in the hope of stopping the rash of such acronyms for machine names, but may have instead further stimulated such use.)[3] From 1957 to 1965 he was a full 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.

  • Metropolis's wartime Los Alamos National Laboratory badge photo.
    Metropolis's wartime Los Alamos National Laboratory badge photo.
  • MANIAC project leader Nicholas Metropolis (standing) and the MANIAC’s chief engineer Jim Richardson in 1953.
    MANIAC project leader Nicholas Metropolis (standing) and the MANIAC’s chief engineer Jim Richardson in 1953.
  • Paul Stein and Nicholas Metropolis play Los Alamos chess against the MANIAC, a simplified version of the game without bishops. The computer still needed about 20 minutes between moves.
    Paul Stein and Nicholas Metropolis play Los Alamos chess against the MANIAC, a simplified version of the game without bishops. The computer still needed about 20 minutes between moves.

Monte Carlo method

At Los Alamos in the late 1940s and early 1950s a group of researchers led by Metropolis, including

Stanislaw Ulam, developed the Monte Carlo method.[5][6] This is a class of computational approaches that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results, named in reference to Ulam's relative's love for the casinos of Monte Carlo. Metropolis was deeply involved in the very first use of the Monte Carlo method, rewiring the ENIAC computer to perform simulations of a nuclear core in 1948.[6] In 1953 Metropolis co-authored a paper entitled Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines.[7] This landmark paper showed the first numerical simulations of a liquid
and introduced a new Monte Carlo computational method for doing so.

In applications of the Monte Carlo method to problems in statistical mechanics prior to the introduction of the Metropolis algorithm, a large number of random configurations of the system would be generated, the properties of interest (such as energy or density) would be computed for each configuration, and then a

Boltzmann factor
, , where is the
energy, is the temperature, and is the Boltzmann constant. The key contribution of the paper was the idea that

Instead of choosing configurations randomly, then weighting them with exp(−E/kT), we choose configurations with a probability exp(−E/kT) and weight them evenly.

— Metropolis et al., [7]

The algorithm for generating samples from the

W.K. Hastings and has become widely known as the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm
.

In recent years a controversy has arisen as to whether Metropolis actually made significant contributions to the Equation of State Calculations paper.[8]

Associations and honors

Metropolis was a member of the

.

The Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics is awarded annually by the American Physical Society.[9]

Acting career

Metropolis played the part of a scientist in the Woody Allen film Husbands and Wives (1992).[10]

Personal life

Metropolis had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Penelope and Katharine. He was an avid skier and tennis player until his mid-seventies. He died at a nursing home in Los Alamos, New Mexico.[11]

Anecdotes

In his memoirs,

Stanislaw Ulam remembers that a small group, including himself, Metropolis, Calkin, Konopinski, Kistiakowsky, Teller and von Neumann, spent several evenings at Los Alamos
playing poker. They played for very small sums, but: "Metropolis once described what a triumph it was to win ten dollars from John von Neumann, author of a famous treatise on game theory. He then bought his book for five dollars and pasted the other five inside the cover as a symbol of his victory." In another passage of his book, Ulam describes Metropolis as "a Greek-American with a wonderful personality."

Erdős number

Metropolis has an Erdős number of 2 and he enabled Richard Feynman to have an Erdős number of 3.[13]

See also

References

  1. ^ ΒΑΡΒΟΓΛΗΣ, Χ (March 16, 2008). Ελληνική σφραγίδα στο πρώτο μηχανοργανωμένο πείραμα. Athens, Greece. Retrieved December 6, 2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. ^ Metropolis, Nicholas Constantine (1915–1999) Eric Weisstein's World of Biography
  3. ^ .
  4. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "MANIAC". YouTube.
  5. ^ Nicolas Metropolis.The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method. Los Alamos Science, No. 15, Page 125.
  6. ^
    S2CID 17470931
    .
  7. ^ .
  8. .
  9. ^ Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics
  10. IMDb
  11. ^ Nick Metropolis dead at 84 Archived 2008-11-07 at the Wayback Machine. Los Alamos National Laboratory Daily News Bulletin. Oct 19, 1999.
  12. ^ S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a mathematician, California University press
  13. ^ "My Erdős Number is Five". barbecuejoe.com.
  14. ^ The History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

External links