Poles are peeved whenever our contribution to historical events is erased from the narrative for the sake of pacing.
If you have not watched Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus yet, there is still time to see it in theaters. A 100-day cinema run is a rarity these days, and the fact Nolan was able to secure it attests to his clout in Hollywood. But brilliant as it is, the film is not without faults, although most will go unnoticed by regular viewing audiences and only miff the worst of nitpickers. But Poles are particularly peeved whenever our contribution to great historical events is erased from the narrative for the sake of pacing.
To set the record straight right from the get-go, this is not intended as a criticism of Nolan’s film. But it is vexing to see the Polish contribution treated like something most easily disposed of when the story needs to be simplified. Even in the old days, when films such as 1969's “The Battle of Britain” and 1977's “A Bridge Too Far” were made, Poles got slightly more respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
Nowadays, we see films such as the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” which tells the story of Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park team of codebreakers working on cracking the Enigma code. As Dr. Grażyna Żebrowska, an adviser at the Polish embassy in D.C., said of the film, “there was an audible sigh in Polish cinemas when [its] contribution was reduced to just one line.”
But Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who broke the code back in 1932 and whose work later allowed Turing to crack successive, more sophisticated versions of the Enigma, were absent from the film, and, after all, it is a film about Turing, not about them. Perhaps they deserve their own film?
Similarly, “Oppenheimer” is a story about none other than Robert Oppenheimer. But with so many characters, many of whom the audience will probably struggle to even remember the names of (those strange foreign names, like Teller, Szilard, Fermi, Bethe, Bohr, Lomanitz, Alvarez, Rabi, and a certain inconspicuous old man named Einstein), it just seems almost deliberate that not once is Stanisław Ulam even mentioned.
There is no point in wallowing in self-pity. If Nolan did not think Ulam was an interesting enough character to include in his picture, let him have his way. In the meantime, here is the story of Stanisław Ulam, who, like Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski, probably deserves his own film.
Stanisław Ulam was born on April 13, 1909, in Lviv, modern-day Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and known by the Polish name Lwów, or Lemberg in German.
He was the son of Józef and Anna. His father was a lawyer, and the well-off Ulams were assimilated into Polish culture, which is attested to by the fact that Stanisław received a typically Polish name associated with two Polish Roman Catholic saints.
The outbreak of World War I forced the family to leave the city, which fell to the Russians before being retaken by the Central Powers later in the war. His father being a staff officer of the reserve mobilized for the war effort, the family moved around the Habsburg empire during wartime, initially to Vienna and then to Moravská Ostrava in what is now the Czech Republic. It was during that time that Stanisław learned German. But young Ulam did not only have a knack for languages. His mind was definitely mathematically oriented.
Even at a young age, he displayed a genius for numbers and would independently come up with solutions to mathematical problems he encountered before learning about how to solve them later in school. His father initially wanted Stanisław to study law and take over the family business but recognized that his son’s talents lay elsewhere, and ultimately Stanisław Ulam went on to study engineering at the Lviv Polytechnic in 1927.
But it seems that engineering was a bit too practical for him. He would spend more time attending courses in math taught by such great minds as Stefan Banach than engineering classes. Ultimately, he decided to pose himself a challenge: should he successfully solve a yet unsolved mathematical problem, he would abandon engineering in favor of studying mathematics.
After all that we have learned about him, will it be a surprise to anyone that Stanisław Ulam ultimately received his doctorate’s degree in mathematics at just 24?
Lviv was a major hub of what is now called the Polish School of Mathematics, which achieved many breakthroughs in the field during the interwar period. It was a great place for forward-thinking mathematicians, but Ulam thought it unlikely that he would be able to attain a professorship in his home country. Mathematics being a universal language, he therefore went on to lecture abroad, initially in Western Europe and then in the U.S.
Ulam lectured at Princeton and then at Harvard. In the summer of 1939, he briefly returned to Poland to collect his younger brother, Adam, who got into Brown University and went on to become a prominent scholar (philosopher, historian, political scientist, Sovietologist, and Harvard professor) in his own right.
While on their way across the Atlantic, the brothers learned of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact via the wireless and of the German invasion once they arrived in the U.S. Stanisław and Adam would be the only members of their immediate family to survive the war, while the rest perished in the Holocaust.
In 1940, Stanisław Ulam got the post of professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he also met his wife, Françoise Aron, a French student of English literature. Next year, he was also granted U.S. citizenship. With his country of birth under brutal occupation and with the U.S. bracing itself for the inevitability of joining the conflict, Ulam felt a need to contribute to the war effort, but he was turned back by the military on account of his poor eyesight (this was also the case with his brother). But he continued to seek an opportunity to work for the army, and in 1943 he was recommended for the Manhattan Project.
The recommendation came for Hans Bethe, whom you could see in Nolan’s film portrayed by Gustaf Skarsgård (yes, of the Skarsgårds).
To put it in brief, Ulam’s job at Los Alamos entailed him doing the thing he was best at, which was coming up with novel and innovative solutions on how to calculate things that were not even theorized about before. The physicists came up with the theory, and when they stumbled upon a problem, they tasked Ulam with doing the calculations.
As the project was nearing completion, some of the scientists at Los Alamos, including Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Stanisław Ulam, were delegated to a branching out “Super” bomb project, which would eventually evolve into the hydrogen bomb. In essence, a hydrogen bomb uses a nuclear bomb (which operates on the principle of splitting atoms, known as nuclear fission) as a charge to launch the process of nuclear fusion, during which atoms of hydrogen are rammed together with enough power to fuse into atoms of heavier elements. To realize how powerful a reaction that is, you have to do nothing more than look up at the Sun.
In 1945, Ulam was struck by a bout of acute encephalitis but managed to recover following emergency surgery, although he did briefly lose the ability to speak, and he feared that the illness could have adversely influenced his mental faculties. Reportedly, after waking up from the post-surgery coma, he was unable to answer the doctor’s question as to what is the product of adding 13 and 8, but upon being asked what is the root of 20, he answered that it was about 4.4. Ulam’s illness had also caused a brief panic at Los Alamos, one reason being the fear that in his fragile state he might spill some secrets and the other being the supposition that his condition may have been caused by radiation, although this turned out not to be the case.
In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb. Its development was facilitated by several scientists working for the Manhattan Project who were either spies motivated by communist ideas or were morally apprehensive about the imbalance of power caused by only one country being in possession of such a powerful weapon.
Yes, because what could possibly be wrong with the proposition that a balance must be maintained between democracies and genocidal dictatorships by giving the latter access to weapons of mass destruction?
This galvanized the U.S. effort to develop an even more powerful “super” bomb, the hydrogen (or thermonuclear) bomb mentioned earlier. Edward Teller headed the project, but the work appeared to be going nowhere as there was no immediately apparent method to exert enough force on hydrogen atoms to start the fusion reaction. Ever the innovator, Ulam suggested some tweaks to the design, which inspired Teller to change it even further and eventually come up with what eventually became the Teller-Ulam design (or configuration), which the two presented in a classified paper in early 1951. The first thermonuclear bomb was successfully tested the next year.
It is odd that anyone would want to compete for the dubious honor of inventing a weapon with a destructive force thousands of times stronger than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the only one who appeared to want the honor purely for himself appeared to be Teller, who went so far as to say that Ulam himself never believed in the design and merely signed the paper upon Teller’s request, thinking that otherwise no one would believe in its feasibility.
It is impossible to know the definite truth, as the documentation remains classified even seven decades later, but other people involved in developing the H-bomb credited both Teller and Ulam to a greater or lesser extent equally, and perhaps Hans Bethe put it in the wittiest manner:
“After the H-bomb was made, reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife.”
As for Ulam himself, he claimed in his autobiography titled “Adventures of a Mathematician”, that he believed the development of a weapon so powerful would make the war an impossibility, except if someone made a mistake.
As we know with the power of hindsight, Ulam was a brilliant mathematician but not much of a prophet. Fortunately, thermonuclear weapons have never yet been used in conflict.
And this is the story of Stanisław Ulam up to the point of the development of the hydrogen bomb. Afterward, he returned to academia and lectured at various U.S. universities. In the aftermath of World War II, Poland became part of the Soviet-dominated communist bloc, whereas his city of birth found itself annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. All of his family, except for several cousins, were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust.
In 1976, the London-based Polish government-in-exile, which, although largely unrecognized internationally, lingered on until communism in Poland finally collapsed and it dissolved itself in recognition of the now-democratically elected authorities in Warsaw, awarded Ulam the Commanders’ Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of Poland’s highest state awards.
Stanisław Ulam died of a heart attack in Santa Fe on May 13, 1984, exactly one month after his 75th birthday. His widow, Françoise Aron Ulam, buried him in her own country, at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, and was laid to rest by his side when she died in 2011.
Their only daughter, Claire Ulam Weiner (1944–2020), served as a consultant when her father’s 1976 autobiography “Adventures of a Mathematician” was adapted on screen by German film director Thorsten Klein with an international cast and crew. The German, Polish, and British co-production was released in early 2020, and Claire could still see the story of her father on screen before she passed away in December of that year.
Yes, that is correct. Stanisław Ulam does actually have a film telling his story. Based on a book he himself penned and filmed with the contribution of his family.
So if you believe that it is possible to make an interesting film about a person such as a physicist or a mathematician (apart from “Oppenheimer” and “The Imitation Game”, there is, after all, “A Beautiful Mind”, the acclaimed film about John Nash starring Russell Crowe), perhaps you might want to give “Adventures of a Mathematician” a go.'
