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This could be my Grandmother on my step-dad's side... She was also a briliant woman that I admired very much.. Cheers

"One of the silent heroes of data science, Arianna Rosenbluth, passed away last month at the age of 93. Rosenbluth contributed to the formation of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm , and was the fifth woman in Harvard University's history to receive a Ph.D. (at the age of 21 no less). In addition to being a physicist, Rosenbluth was also an accomplished fencer who competed and won both men's and women's championships. Although she qualified for the Olympics, she would not compete due World War II and later financial struggles. After she graduated from Harvard, she moved to California as part of her Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. There, she met her future husband Marshall Rosenbluth. The two moved to New Mexico to begin working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where Arianna verified analytic calculations for "Ivy Mike," or the first thermonuclear bomb tests. Once the MANIAC I computer was built for the program, Rosenbluth and several other scientists published the 1953 article Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines wherein the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is first discussed as a statistical method for measuring how atoms behave as solids melt into liquids.

Arianna Rosenbluth programmed the algorithm into MANIAC I. She later applied the method to statistical mechanical systems beyond her work with the Los Alamos lab. When the Rosenbluths moved to San Diego, California in 1956, Arianna left the laboratory for good to raise her children. She never worked in the STEM field again, even as her work on the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm became a crucial underpinning for inferential statistical data sampling. The Metropolis-Hastings was the first of its kind to extrapolate data from a probability distribution when direct sampling is difficult or unavailable—in short, it's a way to understand large volumes of data like election outcomes or the spread of viruses. It is foundational information for computational physics courses. And all in part from a woman who left her incredible legacy in STEM and never looked back. Who knows what kind of other amazing mathematical discoveries she would have made had she never left the field?"

[Image description: A seated photo of Arianna Rosenbluth, an elderly woman with gray hair and glasses, in front of foliage.] Credit & copyright: The Rosenbluth Family.

Written by: Esther P.

Captain_Feelgood 8 Mar 28
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Sounds like one hell of a woman!

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