Notebook 8 · Legacy and the name
8.2 Why ulams
Why the product is named after Ulam, and what the name does and does not claim.
ULAMS is named in tribute to the mathematician Stanisław Ulam (1909–1984). The project is not affiliated with or endorsed by his estate, Los Alamos National Laboratory or any institution associated with him.
What follows is the product's own view, not history. The Scottish Book was a shared record of open questions, and each question was tied to the person who asked it [1]. ULAMS tries to keep courses tied to their sources in the same spirit, so that every statement of a course can be traced to where it came from. The name makes no claim about what Ulam thought of education or software.
Sources
- MacTutor, "The Scottish Book" (Ulam's preface to the 1957 translation), https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Scottish_Book/