VIRTUAL

 Thursday, January 13th    2022

3:45 – 4:45 pm (MT)

WEBEX 


 Speaker:  Nicholas D. Lewis

Los Alamos National Laboratory

WRS-SIS: SECURE INFORMATION SERVICES

“Accounting for Trinity: The Computing Effort that Made Trinity Possible”

 

Abstract: 

This talk provides an overview of the development and contributions of computing at Los Alamos during World War II, including the important role of the human and electromechanical computing efforts to the success of the Trinity test. This talk emphasizes the technical and human networks that came together under wartime pressures to overcome the expected and unexpected challenges of developing the first atomic weapons. It also provides a glimpse of how the networks that came together at Los Alamos primarily for the work leading up to the Trinity test were a core element of the rapid advancement of scientific computing that followed after the war.

Bio:

Nicholas Lewis is an historian with the National Security Research Center, the Lab’s classified library. He earned his PhD in the history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities. He came to Los Alamos in 2014 as a graduate intern with the High Performance Computing Division, where he wrote his dissertation on the development of Los Alamos supercomputing. He then did a postdoc on the history of the Lab’s classified “code cultures,” before joining the NSRC staff in May of 2021.