Nicholas Metropolis

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis
Born	June 11, 1915(1915-06-11)
Died	October 17, 1999 (aged 84) Los Alamos, New Mexico
Citizenship	American
Ethnicity	Greek
Fields	Physicist, Mathematician
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Known for	Monte Carlo method Simulated annealing Metropolis–Hastings algorithm

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (June 11, 1915 – October 17, 1999) was a Greek American physicist.^[1]

Work

Metropolis received his B.Sc. (1937) and Ph.D. (1941) degrees in physics at the University of Chicago. Shortly afterwards, Robert Oppenheimer recruited him from Chicago, where he was at the time collaborating with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on the first nuclear reactors, to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He arrived in the Los Alamos, on April 1943, as a member of the original staff of fifty scientists.

After World War II

Metropolis's wartime Los Alamos National Laboratory badge photo.

After the 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 (T) Division that designed and built the MANIAC I computer in 1952 and MANIAC II in 1957. (He chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of such acronyms for machine names, but may have, instead, only further stimulated such use.^[2]) From 1957 to 1965 he was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and was the founding Director of its Institute for Computer Research. In 1965 he returned to Los Alamos where he was made a Laboratory Senior Fellow in 1980.

Monte Carlo method

Metropolis contributed several original ideas to mathematics, physics and later the computer sciences. Perhaps the most widely known is the Monte Carlo method.^[3] The Monte Carlo method is an epistemological application of the laws of statistics and probability. Also, in 1953 Metropolis co-authored the first paper on a technique that was central to the method known now as simulated annealing.^[4] He also developed an algorithm (the Metropolis algorithm or Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) for generating samples from the Boltzmann distribution, later generalized by W.K. Hastings. He is credited as part of the team that came up with the name Monte Carlo method in reference to a colleague's relative's love for the Casinos of Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. In statistical mechanics applications prior to the introduction of the Metropolis algorithm, the method consisted of generating a large number of random configurations of the system, computing the properties of interest (such as energy or density) for each configuration, and then producing a weighted average where the weight of each configuration is its Boltzmann factor, exp(−E/kT), where E is the energy, T is the temperature, and k is Boltzmann's constant. The key contribution of the Metropolis paper was the idea that

Instead of choosing configurations randomly, then weighting them with exp(−E/kT), we choose configurations with a probability exp(−E/kT) and weight them evenly.

– Metropolis et al., ^[5]

Associations and honors

Metropolis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society. In 1987 he became the first Los Alamos employee honored with the title "emeritus" by the University of California. Metropolis was also awarded the Pioneer Medal by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was a fellow of the American Physical Society.

The Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics is awarded annually by the American Physical Society.^[6]

Acting career

Metropolis played the part of a scientist in the Woody Allen film Husbands and Wives (1992).^[7]

Personal life

Metropolis was an avid skier and tennis player until his mid-seventies. He died in Los Alamos, New Mexico.^[8]

References

External links

• Oral history interview with Nicholas C. Metropolis, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Metropolis, the first director of computing services at Los Alamos National Laboratory, discusses John von Neumann's work in computing. Most of the interview concerns activity at Los Alamos: how von Neumann came to consult at the laboratory; his scientific contacts there, including Metropolis, Robert Richtmyer, and Edward Teller; von Neumann's first hands-on experience with punched card equipment; his contributions to shock-fitting and the implosion problem; interactions between, and comparisons of von Neumann and Enrico Fermi; and the development of Monte Carlo techniques. Other topics include: the relationship between Alan Turing and von Neumann; work on numerical methods for non-linear problems; and the ENIAC calculations done for Los Alamos.
• Francis Harlow and Nicolas Metropolis. Computing and Computers -- Weapons Simulation Leads to the Computer Era. Los Alamos Science No. 7, Page 132.
• Herbert Anderson. Metropolis, Monte Carlo and the MANIAC. Los Alamos Science No. 14, Page 69.