February 18, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Origins of Monte Carlo Method
Yester night we had reached an interesting
juncture wherein to describe the extremely chaotic environment within our cells
need arose to use computation method involving Monte Carlo method that is used
to describe and simulate stochastic processes occurring in nature.
How accurately it does so is of course
debatable since cellular biochemical processes are extremely complicated even
for the fastest silicon processors and the best mathematical models.
The name “Monte Carlo” in the Monte Carlo
method of all the places comes from a gambling casino.
Monte Carlo Casino or Casino de Monte-Carlo
is a gambling and entertainment center situated in the city-state of Monaco on
the French Rivera.
This city state is almost encapsulated by
France which covers it from three sides with one side bordering the
Mediterranean Sea.
The men who popularized the name “Monte
Carlo” for processing of random phenomena were mathematicians and physicists
such as Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi and Nicholas Metropolis.
It is the Polish-American mathematician
Stanislaw Ulam who is considered the founder of Monte Carlo method of
computation.
Ulam and his brother escaped Poland barely
eleven days before the Germany invaded Poland on September 01, 1939.
His entire family including his parents who
were left behind in Poland became the victims of Nazi holocaust.
One uncle of Stanislaw by name of Michał
Ulam who probably escaped the purge of the Nazis would often borrow money to gamble
it away at Monte Carlo casino.
It was through the memory of this gambling
uncle of Ulam on which these men decided to name their computation method so.
You may wonder what a casino has to do with
a stochastic process and that would indeed be a genuine question if you were to
ask me.
For this you need to understand the meaning
of the word “stochastic”.
The word “stochastic” has its origins in
Greek where ‘stokhos’ means ‘aim or guess’.
Stochastic process in current mathematics
and English language refers to any process that is determined by random events.
The simplest and perhaps the most well
known continuous-time stochastic process is the Brownian motion that also takes
place (among others processes as diffusion, osmosis and so on) inside the tiny
intra-cellular space teeming with billions and perhaps trillions of jiggling
molecules.
The random and repetitive nature of any
stochastic process is similar to the activities within casinos where repeated
bets are placed all the time but the outcomes are to a large extent random.
The idea of such a mathematical modeling has
its root in the problem of neutron diffusion in fissionable material.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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