History According to Gardner, Ulam discovered the spiral in 1963 while doodling during the presentation of "a long and very boring paper" at a scientific meeting. These hand calculations amounted to "a few hundred points". Shortly afterwards, Ulam, with collaborators Myron Stein and Mark Wells, used MANIAC II at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to extend the calculation to about 100,000 points. The group also computed the density of primes among numbers up to 10,000,000 along some of the prime-rich lines as well as along some of the prime-poor lines. Images of the spiral up to 65,000 points were displayed on "a scope attached to the machine" and then photographed. The Ulam spiral was described in Martin Gardner's March 1964 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American and featured on the front cover of that issue. Some of the photographs of Stein, Ulam, and Wells were reproduced in the column.
History According to Gardner, Ulam discovered the spiral in 1963 while doodling during the presentation of "a long and very boring paper" at a scientific meeting. These hand calculations amounted to "a few hundred points". Shortly afterwards Ulam, with, collaborators Myron Stein and Mark Wells, used MANIAC II at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to extend the calculation to about 100,000 points. The group also computed the density of primes among numbers up to 10,000,000 along some of the prime-rich lines as well as along some of the prime-poor lines. Images of the spiral up to 65,000 points were displayed on "a scope attached to the machine" and then photographed. The Ulam spiral was described in Martin Gardner's March 1964 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American and featured on the front cover of that issue. Some of the photographs of Stein, Ulam, and Wells were reproduced in the column.