Stanislaw Ulam - Coming To America

Coming To America

In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, for a few months. In December of that year, Ulam sailed to America. At Princeton, he went to lectures and seminars, where he heard Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, and Albert Einstein. During a tea party at von Neumann's house, he encountered G. D. Birkhoff, who suggested that he apply for a position with the Harvard Society of Fellows.

From 1936 to 1939, after following up on Birkhoff's suggestion, Ulam spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Here, he worked with John C. Oxtoby to establish important results regarding ergodic theory, which appeared in Annals of Mathematics in 1941.

On August 20, 1939, in Gdynia, Józef Ulam, along with his brother Szymon, put his two sons, Stanislaw and 17 year old Adam, on a ship headed for America. Within two weeks, the Germans invaded Poland. Within two months, the Germans completed their occupation of western Poland, and the Soviets invaded and occupied eastern Poland. Within two years, Józef Ulam and the rest of his family were victims of the Holocaust, Steinhaus was in hiding, Kuratowski was lecturing at the underground university in Warsaw, Stożek and his two sons had been killed in the massacre of Lwów professors, Banach was surviving Nazi occupation by feeding lice at Rudolf Weigl's typhus research institute, and the last problem had been recorded in the Scottish Book. In 1963, Adam Ulam, who had become an eminent kremlinologist at Harvard, received a letter from George Volsky, who hid in Józef Ulam's house after deserting from the Polish army. This reminiscence gives a chilling account of Lwów's chaotic scenes in late 1939.

In 1940, after being recommended by Birkhoff, Ulam became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Here, he became an American citizen in 1941. That year, he married Françoise Aron. She had been a French exchange student at Mount Holyoke College, whom he met in Cambridge. They had one daughter, Claire. In Madison, Ulam met his friend and colleague C. J. Everett.