Background
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was born on June 11, 1915, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was a son of Constantine Nicholas and Katharine (Ganas) Metropolis.
Νικόλαος Μητρόπουλος
mathematician physicist scientist
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was born on June 11, 1915, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was a son of Constantine Nicholas and Katharine (Ganas) Metropolis.
In 1936 Nicholas Constantine Metropolis received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Chicago and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1941.
Following graduation, Metropolis had a series of appointments during 1942 and 1943 that greatly shaped his future. First, he was a research instructor with James Franck at the University of Chicago. He next became a member of the Manhattan Project under the supervision of Harold C. Urey. He then accepted a staff member position at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory under Edward Teller. Teller persuaded Metropolis to become a theoretical physicist, thereby setting him on a path that would affect the world. Urey brought him to Los Alamos at the invitation of J. Robert Oppenheimer in early April 1943.
After World War II, he returned to the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor. He came back to Los Alamos in 1948 to lead the group in the Theoretical Division that designed and built the MANIAC I computer (Mathematical Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1952 that was modeled on the IAS machine (Institute for Advanced Study machine), and the MANIAC II in 1957. From 1953 to 1959 was an intense period of applications of the MANIAC and of the Monte Carlo technique to fundamental problems in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. These efforts culminated in a series of seminal papers with distinguished co-authors in all those fields.
Metropolis returned to Chicago as founding director of the Institute for Computer Research, remaining there from 1957 to 1965. He designed and built - with a soldering iron in his hands - a computer that was coupled to the Navy cyclotron. This computer could receive and analyze data while an experiment was running, allowing the experimenters to modify their experiments during their allotted time. Metropolis also was active in organizing the data and storing the results on nuclear structure, which was a rapidly developing field of physics at the time.
He edited several works on the sciences, including Frontiers of Supercomputing (1986) and A New Era in Computation (1993). Metropolis became the first professor emeritus of the University of California at Los Alamos when he retired in 1985, but colleagues stated that he never stopped working until shortly before his death, nearly fifteen years later.
Nicholas Constatine Metropolis is best remembered as one of the founding fathers, along with Stan Ulam and John von Neumann, of the Monte Carlo method, which was used to design the first atomic bomb. He coined the terms "Monte Carlo" and "MANIAC."
He was also one of the original staff of fifty scientists at Los Alamos in 1943 during the Manhattan Project. He was a first employee honored with the title "emeritus" by the University of California at Los Alamos. Metropolis was awarded the Pioneer Medal by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
(The transition from serial to parallel computing in which...)
1993(Woody Allen's critically-acclaimed comedy is a hilarious ...)
1992Nicholas Constatine Metropolis established the Nicholas C. Metropolis Mathematics Foundation, whose purpose is to support and promote mathematics and computational science as exciting and challenging career choices, especially among younger students.
Nicholas Constatine Metropolis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society.
Nicholas Constatine Metropolis was an avid skier and tennis player until his mid-seventies. He also found amusement in creating original names for discoveries.
On October 15, 1955, Nicholas Constantine Metropolis married Patricia Hendrix. In 1977 they divorced. They had three children: Katharine, Penelope, Christopher.
