For above all he was a mathematician, and he immediately thrust me among his kind. Early on I noticed that mathematicians live in a world inaccessible to common mortals, and even to each other when they belong to different disciplines. They are a special breed possessed by an intense cerebral life; simultaneously living on two distinct levels of consciousness, they are at once present and able to carry on normally and yet are immersed in the abstractions that form the core of their lives. They are quite different from the community of physicists we were soon to encounter, who seemed much closer to the real world. Stan had a special look in his eyes when pursuing a mathematical-thought. Yet no matter how absorbed he was, he never seemed to mind being interrupted.
Singularly modest about his scientific accomplishments, he was nevertheless keenly aware of his own qualities, which he described as "a blend of memory and imagination, the simple ingredients of mathematical or scientific talent." (Tempered by a healthy dose of common sense, I might add.) He also seemed to prefer to let his imagination roam than to do elaborate technical calculations. "There are so few of us, and so many of them," he said. His old professor and friend, Steinhaus, told me "C'est l'homme au monde qui pose le mieux les problèmes." (He is the man in the world who knows best how to create and formulate problems.) His pretense that he never strained himself with hard work was a pose. His seemingly "effortless luck" and the "brilliant thoughts'' he was known for did not appear out of the blue. From his dictation which I took in shorthand in the past, I saw how tenaciously he returned to the same points over and over again, each time probing a little further.
He also seemed to prefer to embark on new pursuits whenever they occurred to him than to see anything through, whether it was a movie he enjoyed or a scientific point, I asked him about this once and he replied, "I never like to see or do anything to the end for fear the quality will waver and I will be disappointed." He turned this into a disdain for putting his work in the more formal and final printed form. For that he relied on collaborators or "thought processors" as I called them, happy to let them help at their various levels of expertise. To David Hawkins it meant "Stan would dramatize a topic, suggest a pathway, and then I would do the work." Everett said, "Stan tells me what to do and I do it." At my level, and increasingly after retirement when he no longer had regular secretaries, it meant serving as his "live word processor.''
Marc Kac, who had known him when they were students in Poland, told me that "there was not a single mathematician who reminded [him] of Stan," for Stan, besides having an "enormous reservoir of orginality," also "depended more than anyone else [he] knew on the intellectual stimulation that comes from people, even though in 99.999 % of the cases he was the giver." He said that "to Stan mathematics was a much wider subject than to most of us," that he "could see the relevance of mathematical ideas to things which perhaps one would not call mathematics," and that he was "the first and probably the only one who really experimented with machines to discover interesting facts, to stimulate conjectures."
He explained that since Stan came from a "culture based on leisure and discourse," from a "peculiar kind of Polish existence where you were in cafes all hours of the day or night drawing diagrams on small pieces of paper," he was not very well suited for the American system of "timetables and so many hours of teaching." And indeed Stan hardly ever conformed to this more structured way of life. He never became a nine-to-five man, not even at Los Alamos. But despite a certain nostalgia for his Polish past, Stan on the whole thrived in this country. He loved its openness, dynamism, and scientific audacity.
When in the fall of 1943 John von Neumann recruited him to join the Manhattan Project, Stan's life took an abrupt turn. "All at once Stan was connected not only with weapons but with that reservoir of the smartest people in the world. That excited his imagination and he would also excite theirs," Kac said. At Los Alamos, his friendship with Johnny and the force of his personality soon propelled us among the most interesting physicists. Stan relished the work at the frontiers of physics and the intensity of the exchanges between the members of this isolated community. They reminded him of Lwów. And the symbiosis proved very fortunate, for Stan had never considered himself only a mathematician. From the first he loved New Mexico's vistas and the quality of its air. He liked to say it was like champagne. In retrospect I think that we were all a little light-headed from it and from the altitude.
As for me, wartime Los Alamos, perched as it was on its forested mesa, was a strange combination of Swiss village, construction site, and army post with PX and commissary where the sun always seemed to shine whatever the season. Clustered around handsome log buildings and built along the contour of the land, it was essentially Oppenheimer's creation: a sort of Magic Mountain. Life was rustic and egalitarian. The men worked side by side day and night behind fenced areas. The wives mostly kept house and had babies born in P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico, including our daughter, Claire. These babies were then raised with the help of Hispanic women who spoke little English and Indian maids in native dress silently gliding on deerskin moccassins. The military were present to help the strange, international group of civilians Oppenheimer had gathered there.
When the war ended and it seemed that Los Alamos would fold, we promptly went to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where Stan suffered the traumatic illness he describes. Convalescing at the beach with his head still swathed in bandages, he soon showed that his brush with death had left him unscathed. Besides working on an obituary of Banach and talking a little mathematics with Erdös, who was visiting, he passed the time standing by a narrow table, lining up solitaire after solitaire (Canfields). This exercise led to the devising of the Monte Carlo method for computing neutron multiplication.
As his strength returned, rather than remain in the backwaters of academe, Stan opted for a prompt return to Los Alamos, which was not closing its doors after all. From the late forties to the early sixties the nucleus of the town expanded to other mesas and Los Alamos slowly evolved into an almost normal community complete with tract houses, stores, and churches. But the countryside and the climate remained, and its scientists were still at the forefront of the world's efforts to adapt to the new atomic age. It was still a gathering place for the best the country had to offer, who were still blazing trails at the frontiers of science. The cold war and the scientific and political crises that surrounded the development of the H-bomb became part of our daily lives, and we continued to live in a whirl of activity at the lab and at home. Stan had no moral qualms about working on weapons. He was interested in the scientific aspects of the research and did not see anything wrong in that.
In the same sense as the wartime A-Bomb had been Oppenheimer's doing, the postware H-bomb was essentially Teller's, except that Stan had to show him how to go about it, and Los Alamos had to build it without him.