The Renaissance man
When people talk about the individuals involved in the Manhattan project, they usually describe the scientists, engineers, and administrators involved. They do not often do talk about the group’s most forgotten: mathematicians. Most assume that the physicists, scientists, and engineers can handle the mathematics themselves. But during the Manhattan Project, this was not the case. It took one very smart and unique individual, John von Neumann, to help resolve the crises that were going on at Los Alamos and around the country. He was able to use mathematics as the universal language to describe everything. John von Neumann used ability to perceive patterns to make his goal of mathematically unifying and describing not just…show more content… The calculations of the behavior of the nuclear explosions were very hard to combine with the experimental data (Ulam pg 38). Von Neumann realized that to run the experiments, great extensive calculations needed to be done. Ulam remembers what von Neumann said to him in one meeting, “Probably in its execution we shall have to perform more elementary arithmetical steps than the total in all the computations performed by the human race heretofore” (Ulam pg 38). The calculation, even though necessary, took up too much valuable…show more content… He planned out the memory of the machines, the order in which the machine processed the information, and how fast they compute (Ulam pg 32). Von Neumann had brought an early proto-type machine to Los Alamos. The machine was used to track the course of a thermonuclear reaction. This particular problem required more than a billion elementary operations (Ulam pg 32). He also contributed greatly to the Army’s ENIAC computer [‘. The computer as meant for artillery firing tables, but since von Neumann began to work on it, some of its application applied to Los Alamos. Its first calculations were not for the firing tables, but for implosion. An important design of the machine that Neumann created was that the compute was a stored-program machine (Britannica). This meant that the computer stored its instructions in electronic memory, and this was very useful to the Los Alamos team’s ability to calculate faster and with more accuracy
