Nicholas Metropolis

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (June 11, 1915 – October 17, 1999) was an American mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist.

Metropolis received his B.Sc. (1937) and Ph.D. (1941) degrees in experimental 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 the Los Alamos, on April 1943, as a member of the original staff of fifty scientists. After the 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 (T) Division that designed and built the MANIAC I computer in 1952 and 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.) 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.

Metropolis contributed several original ideas to mathematics and physics. Perhaps the most widely known is the Monte Carlo method. Also, in 1953 Metropolis co-authored the first paper on a technique that was central to the method known now as simulated annealing. He also developed an algorithm (the Metropolis algorithm or Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) for generating samples from the Boltzmann distribution, later generalized by W.K. Hastings.

Metropolis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society. In 1987 he became the first Los Alamos employee honored with the title "emeritus" by the University of California. Metropolis was also awarded the Pioneer Medal by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Metropolis was an avid skier and tennis player until his mid-seventies. He died in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It has been suggested that the title character in Dr. Strangelove may in part have been based on him.

External links

• Nick Metropolis dead at 84. Los Alamos National Laboratory Daily News Bulletin. Oct 19, 1999.
• Metropolis, Nicholas Constantine (1915-1999) (at Eric Weisstein's World of Biography)
• Nicolas Metropolis. The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method. Los Alamos Science, No. 15, Page 125.
• Francis Harlow and Nicolas Metropolis. Computing and Computers -- Weapons Simulation Leads to the Computer Era. Los Alamos Science No. 7, Page 132.
• Herbert Anderson. Metropolis, Monte Carlo and the MANIAC. Los Alamos Science No. 14, Page 69.

References

N. Metropolis, A. W. Rosenbluth, M. N. Rosenbluth, A. H. Teller, and E. Teller. "Equation of state calculation by fast computing machines." Journal of Chemical Physics, 21(6):1087–1092, 1953.