Stanislaw Ulam

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (April 13, 1909 – May 13, 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project and proposed the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. He also invented nuclear pulse propulsion and developed a number of mathematical tools in number theory, set theory, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.

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• The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.
  • On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems (LA-2055, May 10, 1955) in Stanisław Marcin Ulam (1990). Analogies between Analogies, The Mathematical Reports of S.M. Ulam and His Los Alamos Collaborators. University of California Press. 
• Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.
  • as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota in Words spoken at the memorial service for S. M. Ulam (The Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, May 17, 1984), published in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 6, Number 4 / December, 1984

• The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems, the second sign is that he forgets to zip up, the third sign is that he forgets to zip down.
  • Attributed in Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998)
  • This has also been attributed, with variants, to Paul Erdős, who repeated the remark.