Manhattan Project
In late spring of 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by J. Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director.
At this time, Ulam knew nothing of Los Alamos. To learn more, he checked out of the library a New Mexico guidebook. On the checkout slip, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, who had mysteriously disappeared from Madison to secret war work. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was America's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb.
Read more about this topic: Stanislaw Ulam
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