The Society’s holdings are full of the papers of scientists who worked on government-sponsored research during WWII, particularly those who worked on atomic projects. Stanislaw Ulam was one of those scientists, pictured here with his daughter at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Born in Poland and trained as a mathematician, Ulam immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s to take fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies and Harvard University.

During the war, Ulam was recruited to work at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories on the Manhattan Project. Ulam helped carry out calculations that led to the proper design of an implosion atomic bomb. In addition, he worked with physicist Edward Teller to design a hydrogen bomb, a design which is believed to underlie all thermonuclear weapons today. Ulam may have had a personal, in addition to patriotic, reason for his work on nuclear weapons. His parents and siblings, with the exception of his brother Adam who had matriculated at Brown University in 1940, were killed at the hands of the Nazis in Poland during the war.

In this photograph, Ulam is shown with his daughter Clare at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1955, ten years after the end of the war.