The following timeline starts with the invention of the

modern computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These pr ...

in the late

interwar In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The interwar period was relativel ...

period.

1930s

John Vincent Atanasoff John Vincent Atanasoff, , (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor from mixed Bulgarian-Irish origin, best known for being credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the ...

and

Clifford Berry Clifford Edward Berry (April 19, 1918 – October 30, 1963) helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC). Biography Clifford Berry was born April 19, 1918, in Gladbr ...

create the first electronic non-programmable, digital computing device, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, that lasted from 1937 to 1942.

1940s

*Nuclear bomb and ballistics simulations at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

and

Ballistic Research Laboratory The Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) was a leading U.S. Army research establishment situated at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland that specialized in ballistics ( interior, exterior, and terminal) as well as vulnerability and lethality analysis. ...

(BRL), respectively. *

Monte Carlo simulation Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...

(voted one of the top 10

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

s of the 20th century by

Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...

and Francis Sullivan in the 2000 issue of Computing in Science and Engineering) is invented at Los Alamos National Laboratory by

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

Stanislaw Ulam Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapon ...

and

Nicholas Metropolis Nicholas Constantine Metropolis (Greek: ; June 11, 1915 – October 17, 1999) was a Greek-American physicist. Metropolis received his BSc (1937) and PhD in physics (1941, with Robert Mulliken) at the University of Chicago. Shortly afterwards, ...

. * First hydrodynamic simulations performed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. * Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of

cellular automata A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...

1950s

* ''

Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines "Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines" is a scholarly article published by Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna W. Rosenbluth, Marshall N. Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller, and Edward Teller in the Journal of Chemical Physics in 1953. T ...

'' introduces the

Metropolis–Hastings algorithm In statistics and statistical physics, the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for obtaining a sequence of random samples from a probability distribution from which direct sampling is difficult. This seque ...

. Also, important earlier independent work by

Berni Alder Berni Julian Alder (September 9, 1925 – September 7, 2020) was a German-born American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of computational modelling of matter. Biography Alder was born in Duisburg, Germany, in Septem ...

and

Stan Frankel Stanley Phillips Frankel (1919 – May, 1978) was an American computer scientist. He worked in the Manhattan Project and developed various computers as a consultant. Early life He was born in Los Angeles, attended graduate school at the Univers ...

. *

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and ...

, Ulam and

John Pasta John Robert Pasta (October 22, 1918 – June 5, 1981) was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physic ...

with help from

Mary Tsingou Mary Tsingou (married name: Mary Tsingou-Menzel; born October 14, 1928) is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known ...

, discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam-Tsingou problem. * Research initiated into

percolation theory In statistical physics and mathematics, percolation theory describes the behavior of a network when nodes or links are added. This is a geometric type of phase transition, since at a critical fraction of addition the network of small, disconnected ...

. *

Molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of the ...

is formulated by Alder and Tom E. Wainwright.

1960s

* Using computational investigations of the

3-body problem In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's ...

, Michael Minovitch formulates the

gravity assist In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement (e.g. orbit around the Sun) and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to alter the p ...

method. * Glauber dynamics is invented for the

Ising model The Ising model () (or Lenz-Ising model or Ising-Lenz model), named after the physicists Ernst Ising and Wilhelm Lenz, is a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables that represent ...

Roy J. Glauber Roy Jay Glauber (September 1, 1925 – December 26, 2018) was an American theoretical physicist. He was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New ...

. *

Edward Lorenz Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and me ...

discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in

chaos theory Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have co ...

. * Molecular dynamics is independently invented by

Aneesur Rahman Aneesur Rahman (24 August 1927 – 6 June 1987) pioneered the application of computational methods to physical systems. His 1964 paper on liquid argon studied a system of 864 argon atoms on a CDC 3600 computer, using a Lennard-Jones potential ...

. *

Walter Kohn Walter Kohn (; March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the unde ...

instigates the development of

density functional theory Density-functional theory (DFT) is a computational quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure (or nuclear structure) (principally the ground state) of many-body ...

(with L.J. Sham and

Pierre Hohenberg Pierre C. Hohenberg (3 October 1934 – 15 December 2017) was a French-American theoretical physicist, who worked primarily on statistical mechanics. Hohenberg studied at Harvard, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degr ...

), for which he shared the Nobel Chemistry Prize (1998). *

Martin Kruskal Martin David Kruskal (; September 28, 1925 – December 26, 2006) was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and ...

and

Norman Zabusky Norman J. Zabusky was an American physicist, who is noted for the discovery of the soliton in the Korteweg–de Vries equation, in work completed with Martin Kruskal. This result early in his career was followed by an extensive body of work in ...

follow up the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem with further numerical experiments, and coin the term "

soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...

". * Kawasaki dynamics is invented for the Ising model. *

Loup Verlet Loup Verlet (; 24 May 1931 – 13 June 2019) was a French physicist who pioneered the computer simulation of molecular dynamics models. In a famous 1967 paper he used what is now known as Verlet integration (a method for the numerical integration ...

(re)discovers a numerical integration algorithm, (first used in 1791 by Jean Baptiste Delambre, by P. H. Cowell and A. C. C. Crommelin in 1909, and by Carl Fredrik Störmer in 1907, hence the alternative names Störmer's method or the Verlet-Störmer method) for dynamics, and the Verlet list.

1970s

*Computer algebra replicates the work of

Boris Delaunay Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay or Delone (russian: Бори́с Никола́евич Делоне́; 15 March 1890 – 17 July 1980) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, mountain climber, and the father of physicist, Nikolai Borisovich Delone. ...

Lunar theory Lunar theory attempts to account for the motions of the Moon. There are many small variations (or perturbations) in the Moon's motion, and many attempts have been made to account for them. After centuries of being problematic, lunar motion can now ...

. *

Martinus Veltman Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman (; 27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory. Biogr ...

's calculations at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

lead him and

Gerard 't Hooft Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the ...

to valuable insights into

renormalizability Renormalization is a collection of techniques in quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, that are used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities by altering ...

electroweak theory In particle physics, the electroweak interaction or electroweak force is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very differe ...

. The computation has been cited as a key reason for the award of the

Nobel Physics Prize ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

that has been given to both. * Jean Hardy,

Yves Pomeau Yves Pomeau, born in 1942, is a French mathematician and physicist, emeritus research director at the CNRS and corresponding member of the French Academy of sciences. He was one of the founders of thLaboratoire de Physique Statistique, École No ...

and Olivier de Pazzis introduce the first lattice gas model, abbreviated as the

HPP model The Hardy–Pomeau–Pazzis (HPP) model is a fundamental lattice gas automaton for the simulation of gases and liquids. It was a precursor to the lattice Boltzmann methods. From lattice gas automata, it is possible to derive the macroscopic Navier ...

after its authors. These later evolved into lattice Boltzmann models. *

Kenneth G. Wilson Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson (June 8, 1936 – June 15, 2013) was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase ...

shows that continuum

quantum chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type ...

(QCD) is recovered for an infinitely large lattice with its sites infinitesimally close to one another, thereby beginning

lattice QCD Lattice QCD is a well-established non-perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory of quarks and gluons. It is a lattice gauge theory formulated on a grid or lattice of points in space and time. When the size of the ...

1980s

* Italian physicists

Roberto Car Roberto Car (born 3 January 1947 in Trieste) is an Italian physicist and the Ralph W. Dornte *31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton University, where he is also a faculty member in the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materia ...

and

Michele Parrinello Michele Parrinello (born 7 September 1945, Messina) is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics (the computer simulation of physical movements of atoms and molecules). Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the ...

invent the Car–Parrinello method. *

Swendsen–Wang algorithm The Swendsen–Wang algorithm is the first non-local or cluster algorithm for Monte Carlo simulation for large systems near criticality. It has been introduced by Robert Swendsen and Jian-Sheng Wang in 1987 at Carnegie Mellon. The original a ...

is invented in the field of Monte Carlo simulations. *

Fast multipole method __NOTOC__ The fast multipole method (FMM) is a numerical technique that was developed to speed up the calculation of long-ranged forces in the ''n''-body problem. It does this by expanding the system Green's function using a multipole expansion, ...

is invented by Vladimir Rokhlin and

Leslie Greengard Dr. Leslie F. Greengard is an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He is co-inventor with Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. of the fast multipole method (FMM) in 1987, recognized as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century. Gree ...

(voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century). * Ullli Wolff invents the

Wolff algorithm The Wolff algorithm, named after Ulli Wolff, is an algorithm for Monte Carlo simulation of the Ising model and Potts model in which the unit to be flipped is not a single spin (as in the heat bath In thermodynamics, heat is defined as the f ...

for statistical physics and Monte Carlo simulation.Wolff, Ulli (1989), "Collective Monte Carlo Updating for Spin Systems", Physical Review Letters, 62 (4): 361

References

{{Reflist

External links

The Monte Carlo Method: Classic PapersMonte Carlo Landmark Papers
Computational physics c