Tag: Computers

[112]

The name of what casino, famous in its own right, took on another use in work by mathematicians John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s?

Show Answer
The Casino de Monte-Carlo in Monaco lent its name to Monte Carlo methods, a type of computational algorithm that enables mathematicians to counter-intuitively use randomness to solve problems that do not involve any randomness. Ulam and von Neumann's work on these algorithms was classified at the time and required a codename, so they used the Monte Carlo, where Ulam's uncle was an avid gambler.