Arianna Wright Rosenbluth
Arianna Wright Rosenbluth
Dr. Rosenbluth obtained a BS from Rice University in 1946, an MA from Radcliffe College in 1947, and a PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1949 at the age of 22 (she was the fifth woman to earn a physics Ph.D. from Harvard since it began awarding them in 1873). She qualified for the 1944 Summer Olympics in fencing, but she didn’t attend because the Games were canceled due to WWII.
Topics covered
Dr. Rosenbluth is known for creating the Metropolis algorithm (now known as the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) which is used in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), among the most common computational statistics methods. The algorithm is named for Nicholas Metropolis, the first co-author of a 1953 paper, entitled Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines, with Arianna W. Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller and Edward Teller. (Hastings extended it to a more general case in 1970.)
Dr. Rosenbluth’s contribution to the Metropolis algorithm was critical because she did all of the coding. Programming languages did not exist at the time, so Dr. Rosenbluth did all of the programming using machine language – strings of 1’s and 0’s.
Despite having a post-doc at Stanford University after her PhD, she left science just after her post-doc when her first child was born. She died of complicataions of COVID-19 in December of 2020 at the age of 93.
Relevant work
Metropolis, N.; Rosenbluth, A.W.; Rosenbluth, M.N.; Teller, A.H.; Teller, E. (1953). Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines. Journal of Chemical Physics. 21 (6): 1087–1092.