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.
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“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And you teetered on the edge of this
Calm street with its sidewalks, its traffic,
As though they are coming to get you.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach us how to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)