![]() Stanislaw Ulam is credited with the initial idea for Monte Carlo mathematics, and he developed it in collaboration with John von Neumann and the astoundingly named Nicholas Metropolis. Of course, this is one of several important random number tables, but its connection with Cold-War weaponization is particularly interesting. As it happened, the main complex system in need of modeling was the chaotic reaction inside the thermonuclear weapons that RAND scientists were then helping to design at Los Alamos. Scientists there were developing a new branch of mathematics called the Monte Carlo Method, which uses random sampling to model complex systems. Production of the so-called RAND Book began at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1947. ![]() ![]() One can hardly resist the impulse to open this hefty volume, but good luck actually reading it. First published for the RAND Corporation in 1955 by the Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates contains exactly what you’d suspect: an extremely large table of random digits. ![]()
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