Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0520052900, Hardcover)

During his forty-year association with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam produced many Laboratory Reports, usually in collaboration with colleagues. Some remain classified to this day. The rest are in this volume, easily accessible for the first time to mathematicians, physical scientists, and historians. The timeliness of these papers is remarkable. They contain seminal ideas in fields such as the theory of parallel computation, cellular automata, mathematical biology, and nonlinear stochastic processes. Ulam's fertile ideas were far ahead of their time, and ranged over many branches of science. He fulfilled the statement of his friend and mentor, the great mathematician Stefan Banach, that the very best mathematicians see "analogies between analogies." Introduced by A. R. Bednarek and Franoise Ulam, the Los Alamos reports offer a unique view of one of the twentieth century's intellectual pioneers.