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Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is a 1994 American comedy-drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Eric Roth. It is an adaptation of the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom, and stars Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field.

The film follows the life of an Alabama man named Forrest Gump (Hanks) and his experiences in the 20th-century United States. Principal photography took place between August and December 1993, mainly in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Extensive visual effects were used to incorporate Hanks into archived footage and to develop other scenes. The soundtrack features songs reflecting the different periods seen in the film.

Forrest Gump was released in the United States on July 6, 1994, and received widespread critical acclaim for Zemeckis's direction, performances (particularly those of Hanks and Sinise), visual effects, music, and screenplay. The film was a major success at the box office: it became the top-grossing film in the United States released that year and earned over US$678.2million worldwide during its theatrical run, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 1994, behind The Lion King. The soundtrack sold over 12 million copies. Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hanks, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, and Best Film Editing. It received many award nominations, including Golden Globes, British Academy Film Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Various interpretations have been made of the protagonist and the film's political symbolism. In 2011, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot
In 1981, at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia, a man named Forrest Gump recounts his life story to strangers who sit next to him on a bench.

In 1951, in Greenbow, Alabama, young Forrest is fitted with leg braces to correct a curved spine, and is unable to walk properly. He lives alone with his mother, who runs a boarding house out of their home that attracts many tenants, including a young Elvis Presley, who plays the guitar for Forrest and incorporates Forrest's jerky dance movements into his performances. On his first day of school, Forrest meets a girl named Jenny Curran, and the two become best friends.

Forrest is often bullied because of his physical disability and low intelligence. While fleeing from several bullies, his leg braces break off, revealing Forrest to be a very fast runner. This talent eventually allows him to receive a football scholarship at the University of Alabama in 1963, where he is coached by Bear Bryant, and witnesses Governor George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, during which he returns a dropped book to Vivian Malone Jones. Forrest becomes a top kick returner, is named on the All-American team, and meets President John F. Kennedy at the White House.

After graduating college in 1966, Forrest enlists into the U.S. Army. During basic training, he befriends a fellow soldier named Benjamin Buford Blue (nicknamed "Bubba"), who convinces Forrest to go into the shrimping business with him after their service. In 1967, they are sent to Vietnam, serving with the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta region. After months of routine operations, their platoon is ambushed while on patrol, and Bubba is killed in action. Forrest saves several wounded platoon mates – including his lieutenant, Dan Taylor, who loses both his legs – and is awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

At the anti-war March on the Pentagon rally, Forrest meets Abbie Hoffman and briefly reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie lifestyle. He also develops a talent for ping-pong, and becomes a sports celebrity as he competes against Chinese teams in ping-pong diplomacy, earning him an interview alongside John Lennon on The Dick Cavett Show, influencing the song "Imagine". He spends the 1971 New Year's Eve in New York City with Dan, who has become an embittered cripple. Forrest soon meets President Richard Nixon and is put up in the Watergate complex, where he unwittingly exposes the Watergate scandal.

Discharged from the army, Forrest returns to Greenbow and endorses a company that makes ping-pong paddles. He uses the earnings to buy a shrimping boat in Bayou La Batre, fulfilling his promise to Bubba. Dan joins Forrest in 1974, and they initially have little success. After their boat becomes the only one to survive Hurricane Carmen, they pull in huge amounts of shrimp and create the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, after which Dan finally thanks Forrest for saving his life. Forrest returns home to his mother as she dies of cancer. Dan invests into Apple Inc. and the two become millionaires, but Forrest also shares their earnings with the community and Bubba's family.

In 1976, Jenny returns to stay with Forrest, recovering from years of child abuse, drugs, and prostitution. After a while, Forrest proposes to her. She tells Forrest she loves him and the two have sex, but she leaves the next morning. Heartbroken, Forrest goes running and spends the next three years in a relentless cross-country marathon, becoming famous again before returning to Greenbow.

In 1981, Forrest reveals that he is waiting at the bus stop because he received a letter from Jenny, who asked him to visit her. Forrest is finally reunited with Jenny, who introduces him to their son, Forrest Gump Jr.. Jenny tells Forrest she is sick with an unknown incurable virus, and the three move back to Greenbow. Jenny and Forrest finally marry, but she dies a year later. The film ends with Forrest sending his son off on his first day of school.

Cast

 * Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump: At an early age, Forrest is deemed to have a below-average IQ of 75. He has an endearing character and shows devotion to his loved ones and duties, character traits that bring him into many life-changing situations. Along the way, he encounters many historical figures and events throughout his life. Hanks also briefly plays Nathan Bedford Forrest in The Birth of a Nation scene.
 * Michael Conner Humphreys as young Forrest Gump: Hanks revealed in interviews that instead of having Michael copy his accent, he incorporated Michael's unique Southern accented drawl into the older character's accent.
 * Robin Wright as Jenny Curran: Forrest's childhood friend with whom he immediately falls in love, and never stops loving throughout his life. A victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of her bitter, widowed father, Jenny embarks on a different path from Forrest, leading a self-destructive life and becoming part of the hippie movement in California in the 1960s and the following Me Decade's sex and drug culture of the 1970s. She re-enters Forrest's life at various times in adulthood. Jenny eventually becomes a waitress in Savannah, Georgia, where she lives in an apartment with her (and Forrest's) son, Forrest Jr. They eventually get married, but soon afterward she dies from complications due to an unnamed disease. This unknown disease was intended by Winston Groom, the author of the original novel, to be Hepatitis C, itself an "unknown virus" until defined in April 1989, although some of the makers of the film have said that they intended for the unknown disease to have been HIV/AIDS.
 * Hanna R. Hall as young Jenny Curran
 * Gary Sinise as Lieutenant Dan Taylor: Forrest and Bubba Blue's platoon leader during the Vietnam War, whose ancestors have died in every U.S. war and who regards it as his destiny to do the same. After losing his legs in an ambush and being rescued against his will by Forrest, he is initially bitter and antagonistic toward Forrest for leaving him a "cripple" and denying him his family's destiny, falling into a deep depression. He later serves as Forrest's first mate at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, gives most of the orders, becomes wealthy with Forrest, and regains his will to live. He ultimately forgives and thanks Forrest for saving his life. By the end of the film, he is engaged to be married to his fiancée Susan and is sporting "magic legs" – titanium alloy prosthetics that allow him to walk again.
 * Mykelti Williamson as Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue: Bubba was originally supposed to be the senior partner in the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, but due to his death in Vietnam, their platoon leader, Dan Taylor, took his place. The company posthumously carried his name. Forrest later gave Bubba's mother (Marlena Smalls) Bubba's share of the business. Throughout filming, Williamson wore a lip attachment to create Bubba's protruding lip.
 * Sally Field as Mrs. Gump: Forrest's mother. Field reflected on the character, "She's a woman who loves her son unconditionally. ... A lot of her dialogue sounds like slogans, and that's just what she intends."
 * Haley Joel Osment as Forrest Gump Jr., aka the AIDS baby: Osment was cast in the film after the casting director noticed him in a 1993 Pizza Hut commercial. It was his debut feature film role.
 * Peter Dobson as Elvis Presley: Although Kurt Russell was uncredited, he provided the voice for Elvis in the scene.
 * Dick Cavett as himself: Cavett played a de-aged version of himself in the 1970s, with makeup applied to make him appear younger. Consequently, Cavett is the only well-known figure in the film to play a cameo role rather than be represented through the use of archival footage like John Lennon, Alabama Governor George Wallace, and Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
 * Sam Anderson as Principal Hancock: Forrest's elementary school principal.
 * Geoffrey Blake as Wesley: A member of the SDS group and Jenny's abusive boyfriend
 * Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Dorothy Harris: The school bus driver who drives Forrest, and later his son, to school
 * Sonny Shroyer as Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant
 * Grand L. Bush, Michael Jace, Conor Kennelly, and Teddy Lane Jr. as the Black Panthers
 * Richard D'Alessandro as Abbie Hoffman
 * Tiffany Salerno and Marla Sucharetza as "Cunning" Carla and "Long-Limbs" Lenore: a couple of prostitutes that Forrest and Dan spend a New Year's evening with and later turn away

Pre-production and script
The film is based on the 1986 novel by Winston Groom. Both center on the character of Forrest Gump. However, the film primarily focuses on the first eleven chapters of the novel before skipping ahead to the end of the novel, with the founding of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and the meeting with Forrest Jr. In addition to skipping some parts of the novel, the film adds several aspects to Gump's life that do not occur in the novel, such as his needing leg braces as a child and his run across the United States.

Gump's core character and personality are also changed from the novel; among other things, his film character is less of a savant—in the novel, while playing football at the university, he fails craft and gym but receives a perfect score in an advanced physics class he is enrolled in by his coach to satisfy his college requirements. The novel also features Gump as an astronaut, a professional wrestler, and a chess player.

The book had a bidding war regarding an adaptation even before publication, with Wendy Finerman and Steve Tisch acquiring them by joining forces with Warner Bros., where Finerman's husband Mark Canton was president of production. Groom was paid $500,000 and also wrote the first three first drafts of the screenplay, which leaned closer to the events of the novel. After Rain Man told the story of a savant, Warner lost interest in the picture, and by 1990 the project was in turnaround. Finerman contacted Columbia Pictures, who went on to reject it, while hiring Eric Roth to rewrite the script. Roth and Finerman kept in contact with Groom to ensure the script was historically accurate. Roth delivered a screenplay in 1992, which Paramount Pictures chairwoman Sherry Lansing liked enough to bring the project to her studio, who acquired the rights from Warner in exchange for the script for Executive Decision.

Ivan Reitman, Penny Marshall and Terry Gilliam passed on the project before Robert Zemeckis was hired. Barry Sonnenfeld was attached to the film, but left to direct Addams Family Values.

Casting
John Travolta was the original choice to play the title role and said that passing on the role was a mistake. Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Matthew Broderick were also considered for the role. Sean Penn had stated in an interview that he had been second choice for the role, but would later portray a character with a disability in the 2001 film I Am Sam. Hanks revealed that he signed on to the film after an hour and a half of reading the script. He initially wanted to ease Forrest's pronounced Southern accent, but was eventually persuaded by director Robert Zemeckis to portray the heavy accent stressed in the novel. Hanks also said it took him three days producing unusable footage in order to learn how to play the role. Winston Groom, who wrote the original novel, describes the film as having taken the "rough edges" off the character whom he had envisioned being played by John Goodman. Additionally, Tom's younger brother Jim Hanks is his acting double in the movie for the scenes when Forrest runs across the U.S. Tom's daughter Elizabeth Hanks appears in the movie as the girl on the school bus who refuses to let young Forrest sit next to her. Joe Pesci was considered for the role of Lieutenant Dan Taylor, which was eventually given to Gary Sinise. Sinise drew inspiration from the struggles that Vietnam veterans, some on his wife’s side of his family, were going through when returning from serving in Vietnam. David Alan Grier, Ice Cube and Dave Chappelle were offered the role of Benjamin Buford Blue, but all three turned it down. Chappelle, who said he believed the film would be unsuccessful, has been reported as saying that he regrets not taking the role. Hanks was aware of Chappelle's disappointment in missing out on the part and agreed to work with him in a future movie, which ended up being You've Got Mail. Rapper Tupac Shakur also auditioned.

Filming
Filming began in August 1993 and ended in December of that year. Although most of the film is set in Alabama, filming took place mainly in and around Beaufort, South Carolina, as well as parts of coastal Virginia and North Carolina, including a running shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Grandfather Mountain where a part of the road subsequently became known as "Forrest Gump Curve". Downtown portions of the fictional town of Greenbow were filmed in Varnville, South Carolina. The scene of Forrest running through Vietnam while under fire was filmed on Hunting Island State Park and Fripp Island, South Carolina. Additional filming took place on the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. The Gump family home set was built along the Combahee River near Yemassee, South Carolina, and the nearby land was used to film Curran's home as well as some of the Vietnam scenes. Over 20 palmetto trees were planted to improve the Vietnam scenes. Forrest Gump narrated his life's story at the northern edge of Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia, as he sat at a bus stop bench. There were other scenes filmed in and around the Savannah area as well, including a running shot on the Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge in Beaufort while he was being interviewed by the press, and on West Bay Street in Savannah. Most of the college campus scenes were filmed in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. The lighthouse that Forrest runs across to reach the Atlantic Ocean the first time is the Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. Additional scenes were filmed in Arizona, Utah's Monument Valley, and Montana's Glacier National Park.

Visual effects

Ken Ralston and his team at Industrial Light & Magic were responsible for the film's visual effects. Using CGI techniques, it was possible to depict Gump meeting deceased personages and shaking their hands. Hanks was first shot against a blue screen along with reference markers so that he could line up with the archive footage. To record the voices of the historical figures, voice actors were filmed and special effects were used to alter lip-syncing for the new dialogue. Archival footage was used and with the help of such techniques as chroma key, image warping, morphing, and rotoscoping, Hanks was integrated into it.

In one Vietnam War scene, Gump carries Bubba away from an incoming napalm attack. To create the effect, stunt actors were initially used for compositing purposes. Then, Hanks and Williamson were filmed, with Williamson supported by a cable wire as Hanks ran with him. The explosion was then filmed, and the actors were digitally added to appear just in front of the explosions. The jet fighters and napalm canisters were also added by CGI.

The CGI removal of actor Gary Sinise's legs, after his character had them amputated, was achieved by wrapping his legs with a blue fabric, which later facilitated the work of the "roto-paint" team to paint out his legs from every single frame. At one point, while hoisting himself into his wheelchair, his legs are used for support.

The scene where Forrest spots Jenny at a peace rally at the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., required visual effects to create the large crowd of people. Over two days of filming, approximately 1,500 extras were used. At each successive take, the extras were rearranged and moved into a different quadrant away from the camera. With the help of computers, the extras were multiplied to create a crowd of several hundred thousand people.

Box office
Produced on a budget of $55 million, Forrest Gump opened in 1,595 theaters in the United States and Canada grossing $24,450,602 in its opening weekend. Motion picture business consultant and screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton suggested to producer Wendy Finerman to double the P&A (film marketing budget) based on his viewing of an early print of the film. The budget was immediately increased, in line with his advice. In its opening weekend, the film placed first at the US box office, narrowly beating The Lion King, which was in its fourth week of release. For the first twelve weeks of release, the film was in the top 3 at the US box office, topping the list 5 times, including in its tenth week of release. Paramount removed the film from release in the United States when its gross hit $300 million in January 1995, and it was the second-highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Lion King with $305 million. The film was reissued on February 17, 1995, after the Academy Awards nominations were announced. After the reissue in 1,100 theaters, the film grossed an additional $29 million in the United States and Canada, bringing its total to $329.7 million, making it the third-highest-grossing film at that time behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park, and was Paramount's biggest, surpassing Raiders of the Lost Ark. Forrest Gump held the record for being the highest-grossing Paramount film until it was taken by Titanic three years later in 1997. However, it remained the highest-grossing film solely distributed by Paramount until it was surpassed by Shrek the Third 13 years later in 2007. Ultimately, it finished as the 4th highest grossing film of the 1990s domestically. For 12 years, it remained as the highest-grossing film starring Tom Hanks; it was surpassed in 2006 by The Da Vinci Code. Box Office Mojo estimates that the film sold over 78.5 million tickets in the US and Canada in its initial theatrical run.

The film took 66 days to surpass $250 million and was the fastest grossing Paramount film to pass $100 million, $200 million, and $300 million in box office receipts (at the time of its release). After reissues, the film has gross receipts of $330,252,182 in the U.S. and Canada and $347,693,217 in international markets for a total of $677,945,399 worldwide. Even with such revenue, the film was known as a "successful failure"; due to distributors' and exhibitors' high fees, Paramount's "losses" clocked in at $62 million, leaving executives realizing the necessity of better deals. This has also been associated with Hollywood accounting, where expenses are inflated to minimize profit sharing.

Critical reception
At the website Metacritic, the film earned a rating of 82 out of 100 based on 20 reviews by mainstream critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare "A+" grade.

The story was commended by several critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "I've never met anyone like Forrest Gump in a movie before, and for that matter I've never seen a movie quite like 'Forrest Gump.' Any attempt to describe him will risk making the movie seem more conventional than it is, but let me try. It's a comedy, I guess. Or maybe a drama. Or a dream. The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction...The performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths...What a magical movie." Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that the film "has been very well worked out on all levels, and manages the difficult feat of being an intimate, even delicate tale played with an appealingly light touch against an epic backdrop." In contrast, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called the film "Warm, wise, and wearisome as hell." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly said that the film was "glib, shallow, and monotonous" and "reduces the tumult of the last few decades to a virtual-reality theme park: a baby-boomer version of Disney's America."

Gump garnered comparisons to fictional character Huckleberry Finn, as well as U.S. politicians Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan and Bill Clinton. Peter Chomo writes that Gump acts as a "social mediator and as an agent of redemption in divided times". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called Gump "everything we admire in the American character – honest, brave, and loyal with a heart of gold." The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called Gump a "hollow man" who is "self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing." Marc Vincenti of Palo Alto Weekly called the character "a pitiful stooge taking the pie of life in the face, thoughtfully licking his fingers." Bruce Kawin and Gerald Mast's textbook on film history notes that Forrest Gump's dimness was a metaphor for glamorized nostalgia in that he represented a blank slate onto which the Baby Boomer generation projected their memories of those events.

Re-evaluation
Writing in 2004, Entertainment Weekly said, "Nearly a decade after it earned gazillions and swept the Oscars, Robert Zemeckis's ode to 20th-century America still represents one of cinema's most clearly drawn lines in the sand. One half of folks see it as an artificial piece of pop melodrama, while everyone else raves that it's sweet as a box of chocolates."

In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy members, asking them to re-vote on past controversial decisions. Academy members said that, given a second chance, they would award the 1994 Oscar for Best Picture to The Shawshank Redemption instead.

Author payment controversy
Winston Groom was paid $350,000 for the screenplay rights to his novel Forrest Gump and was contracted for a 3 percent share of the film's net profits. However, Paramount and the film's producers did not pay him the percentage, using Hollywood accounting to posit that the blockbuster film lost money. Tom Hanks, by contrast, contracted for a percent share of the film's gross receipts instead of a salary, and he and director Zemeckis each received $40 million. In addition, Groom was not mentioned once in any of the film's six Oscar-winner speeches.

Groom's dispute with Paramount was later effectively resolved after Groom declared he was satisfied with Paramount's explanation of their accounting, this coinciding with Groom receiving a seven-figure contract with Paramount for film rights to another of his books, Gump & Co. This film was never made, remaining in development hell for at least a dozen years.

Home video
Forrest Gump was first released on VHS on April 27, 1995, and on Laserdisc the following day. The laserdisc was THX certified and released without chapters, requiring the film be watched start to finish. Film magazines of the period stated this was at the request of Zemeckis who wanted viewers to enjoy the film in its entirety. It became the best-selling adult sell-through video with sales of over 12 million. A widescreen VHS release debuted a year later on September 10, 1996. It was released in a two-disc DVD set on August 28, 2001. Special features included director and producer commentaries, production featurettes, and screen tests. The film was released on Blu-ray in November 2009. Paramount released the film on Ultra HD Blu-ray in June 2018. On May 7, 2019, Paramount Pictures released a newly remastered two-disc Blu-ray that contains bonus content.

Accolades
Forrest Gump won Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Hanks had won the previous year for Philadelphia), Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing at the 67th Academy Awards. The film was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, winning three of them: Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture, and Best Motion Picture – Drama. The film was also nominated for six Saturn Awards and won two for Best Fantasy Film and Best Supporting Actor (Film).

In addition to the film's multiple awards and nominations, it has also been recognized by the American Film Institute on several of its lists. The film ranks 37th on 100 Years...100 Cheers, 71st on 100 Years...100 Movies, and 76th on 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition). In addition, the quote "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get," was ranked 40th on 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes. The film also ranked at number 61 on Empire's list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.

In December 2011, Forrest Gump was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The Registry said that the film was "honored for its technological innovations (the digital insertion of Gump seamlessly into vintage archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and what he represents in terms of American innocence) to the status of folk hero, and its attempt to engage both playfully and seriously with contentious aspects of the era's traumatic history."

American Film Institute lists
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #71
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
 * "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." – #40
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers – #37
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #76

Feather
Various interpretations have been suggested for the feather present at the opening and conclusion of the film. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times noted several suggestions made about the feather: "Does the white feather symbolize The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Forrest Gump's impaired intellect? The randomness of experience?" Hanks interpreted the feather as: "Our destiny is only defined by how we deal with the chance elements to our life and that's kind of the embodiment of the feather as it comes in. Here is this thing that can land anywhere and that it lands at your feet. It has theological implications that are really huge." Sally Field compared the feather to fate, saying: "It blows in the wind and just touches down here or there. Was it planned or was it just perchance?" Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston compared the feather to an abstract painting: "It can mean so many things to so many different people."

Political interpretations
Hanks states that "the film is non-political and thus non-judgmental". Nevertheless, CNN's Crossfire debated in 1994 whether the film promoted conservative values or was an indictment of the counterculture of the 1960s. Thomas Byers called it "an aggressively conservative film" in a Modern Fiction Studies article.

It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug use, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation. Jennifer Hyland Wang argues in a Cinema Journal article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade" in the 1960s. She also notes that the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, developed the screenplay from the novel and transferred to Jenny "all of Gump's flaws and most of the excesses committed by Americans in the 1960s and 1970s".

Other commentators believe the film forecast the 1994 Republican Revolution and used the image of Forrest Gump to promote movement leader Newt Gingrich's traditional, conservative values. Jennifer Hyland Wang observes that the film idealizes the 1950s, as made evident by the lack of "Whites Only"-signs in Gump's Southern childhood, and envisions the 1960s as a period of social conflict and confusion. She argues that this sharp contrast between the decades criticizes the counterculture values and reaffirms conservatism. Wang argues that the film was used by Republican politicians to illustrate a "traditional version of recent history" to gear voters toward their ideology for the congressional elections. Presidential candidate Bob Dole stated that the film's message was "no matter how great the adversity, the American Dream is within everybody's reach".

In 1995, National Review included Forrest Gump in its list of the "Best 100 Conservative Movies" of all time, and ranked it number four on its "25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years" list. National Review 's John Miller wrote that "Tom Hanks plays the title-character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright Penn, chooses a different path; she becomes a drug-addled hippie, with disastrous results."

Professor James Burton at Salisbury University argues that conservatives claimed Forrest Gump as their own due less to the content of the film and more to the historical and cultural context of 1994. Burton claims that the film's content and advertising campaign were affected by the cultural climate of the 1990s, which emphasized family values and American values, epitomized in the book Hollywood vs. America. He claims that this climate influenced the apolitical nature of the film, which allowed many different political interpretations.

Some commentators see the conservative readings of Forrest Gump as indicating the death of irony in American culture. Vivian Sobchack notes that the film's humor and irony rely on the assumption of the audience's historical knowledge.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack, featuring 32 songs from the film, was released on July 6, 1994. With the exception of a lengthy suite of themes from Alan Silvestri's original score, all the songs are previously released. Among the artists featured in the film are Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Doors, Canned Heat, Harry Nilsson, The Mamas & the Papas, The Doobie Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Seger, Randy Newman, Willie Nelson, Fleetwood Mac, KC & The Sunshine Band, and Buffalo Springfield. Reflecting on compiling the soundtrack, music producer Joel Sill stated "We wanted to have very recognizable material that would pinpoint time periods, yet we didn't want to interfere with what was happening cinematically." The film and the two-disc album have a variety of music from the 1950s to the 1980s performed by American artists. According to Sill, Zemeckis requested this because he thought that American music was the only kind of music Forrest would buy, further stating "All the material in there is American. Bob (Zemeckis) felt strongly about it. He felt that Forrest wouldn't buy anything but American."

The soundtrack reached a peak of number 2 on the Billboard album chart. The soundtrack went on to sell twelve million copies, and is one of the top selling albums in the US. The Oscar-nominated score for the film was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri and released on August 2, 1994.

Novel-sequel
The screenplay for the sequel was written by Eric Roth in 2001. It is based on the original novel's sequel, Gump and Co., written by Winston Groom in 1995. Roth's script begins with Forrest sitting on a bench waiting for his son to return from school. After the September 11 attacks, Roth, Zemeckis, and Hanks decided the story was no longer "relevant." In March 2007, however, it was reported Paramount producers took another look at the screenplay.

On the first page of the sequel novel, Forrest Gump tells readers "Don't never let nobody make a movie of your life's story," and "Whether they get it right or wrong, it doesn't matter." The first chapter of the book suggests the real-life events surrounding the film have been incorporated into Forrest's storyline, and that Forrest got a lot of media attention as a result of the film. During the course of the sequel novel, Gump runs into Tom Hanks and at the end of the novel in the film's release, includes Gump going on The David Letterman Show and attending the Academy Awards.

Indian remake
The Indian film Laal Singh Chaddha, released in August 2022 and starring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor in the title role, is an authorized remake of Forrest Gump, set in India between the late 1970s and the 2010s. The film was directed by Advait Chandan and produced by Aamir Khan Productions, Viacom18 Studios and Paramount Pictures.

title: Forrest Gump


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Stanisław Ulam

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary; Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski and Włodzimierz Stożek. In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish important results regarding ergodic theory. On 20 August 1939, he sailed for the United States for the last time with his 17-year-old brother Adam Ulam. He became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, and a United States citizen in 1941.

In October 1943, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to join the Manhattan Project at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. There, he worked on the hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of the explosive lenses that were needed by an implosion-type weapon. He was assigned to Edward Teller's group, where he worked on Teller's "Super" bomb for Teller and Enrico Fermi. After the war he left to become an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to work on thermonuclear weapons. With the aid of a cadre of female "computers" he found that Teller's "Super" design was unworkable. In January 1951, Ulam and Teller came up with the Teller–Ulam design, which became the basis for all thermonuclear weapons.

Ulam considered the problem of nuclear propulsion of rockets, which was pursued by Project Rover, and proposed, as an alternative to Rover's nuclear thermal rocket, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion, which became Project Orion. With Fermi, John Pasta, and Mary Tsingou, Ulam studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem, which became the inspiration for the field of nonlinear science. He is probably best known for realizing that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method has become a common and standard approach to many problems.

Poland
Ulam was born in Lemberg, Galicia, on 13 April 1909. At this time, Galicia was in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was known to Poles as the Austrian partition. In 1918, it became part of the newly restored Poland, the Second Polish Republic, and the city took its Polish name again, Lwów.

The Ulams were a wealthy Polish Jewish family of bankers, industrialists, and other professionals. Ulam's immediate family was "well-to-do but hardly rich". His father, Józef Ulam, was born in Lwów and was a lawyer, and his mother, Anna (née Auerbach), was born in Stryj. His uncle, Michał Ulam, was an architect, building contractor, and lumber industrialist. From 1916 until 1918, Józef's family lived temporarily in Vienna. After they returned, Lwów became the epicenter of the Polish–Ukrainian War, during which the city experienced a Ukrainian siege.

In 1919, Ulam entered Lwów Gymnasium Nr. VII, from which he graduated in 1927. He then studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute. Under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski, he received his Master of Arts degree in 1932, and became a Doctor of Science in 1933. At the age of 20, in 1929, he published his first paper Concerning Function of Sets in the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae. From 1931 until 1935, he traveled to and studied in Wilno (Vilnius), Vienna, Zürich, Paris, and Cambridge, England, where he met G. H. Hardy and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Along with Stanisław Mazur, Mark Kac, Włodzimierz Stożek, Kuratowski, and others, Ulam was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Its founders were Hugo Steinhaus and Stefan Banach, who were professors at the Jan Kazimierz University. Mathematicians of this "school" met for long hours at the Scottish Café, where the problems they discussed were collected in the Scottish Book, a thick notebook provided by Banach's wife. Ulam was a major contributor to the book. Of the 193 problems recorded between 1935 and 1941, he contributed 40 problems as a single author, another 11 with Banach and Mazur, and an additional 15 with others. In 1957, he received from Steinhaus a copy of the book, which had survived the war, and translated it into English. In 1981, Ulam's friend R. Daniel Mauldin published an expanded and annotated version.

Move to the United States
In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. In December of that year, Ulam sailed to the US. At Princeton, he went to lectures and seminars, where he heard Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, and Albert Einstein. During a tea party at von Neumann's house, he encountered G. D. Birkhoff, who suggested that he apply for a position with the Harvard Society of Fellows. Following up on Birkhoff's suggestion, Ulam spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1936 to 1939, where he worked with John C. Oxtoby to establish results regarding ergodic theory. These appeared in Annals of Mathematics in 1941. In 1938, Stanislaw's mother Anna Hanna Ulam (née Auerbach) died of cancer.

On 20 August 1939, in Gdynia, Józef Ulam, along with his brother Szymon, put his two sons, Stanislaw and 17-year-old Adam, on a ship headed for the US. Eleven days later, the Germans invaded Poland. Within two months, the Germans completed their occupation of western Poland, and the Soviets invaded and occupied eastern Poland. Within two years, Józef Ulam and the rest of his family, including Stanislaw's sister Stefania Ulam, were victims of the Holocaust, Hugo Steinhaus was in hiding, Kazimierz Kuratowski was lecturing at the underground university in Warsaw, Włodzimierz Stożek and his two sons had been killed in the massacre of Lwów professors, and the last problem had been recorded in the Scottish Book. Stefan Banach survived the Nazi occupation by feeding lice at Rudolf Weigl's typhus research institute. In 1963, Adam Ulam, who had become an eminent kremlinologist at Harvard, received a letter from George Volsky, who hid in Józef Ulam's house after deserting from the Polish army. This reminiscence gave a chilling account of Lwów's chaotic scenes in late 1939. In later life Ulam described himself as "an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate".

In 1940, after being recommended by Birkhoff, Ulam became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Here, he became a United States citizen in 1941. That year, he married Françoise Aron. She had been a French exchange student at Mount Holyoke College, whom he met in Cambridge. They had one daughter, Claire. In Madison, Ulam met his friend and colleague C. J. Everett, with whom he collaborated on a number of papers.

Manhattan Project
In early 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director. Knowing nothing of the area, he borrowed a New Mexico guide book. On the checkout card, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, all of whom had mysteriously disappeared. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was the US's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb.

Hydrodynamical calculations of implosion
A few weeks after Ulam reached Los Alamos in February 1944, the project experienced a crisis. In April, Emilio Segrè discovered that plutonium made in reactors would not work in a gun-type plutonium weapon like the "Thin Man", which was being developed in parallel with a uranium weapon, the "Little Boy" that was dropped on Hiroshima. This problem threatened to waste an enormous investment in new reactors at the Hanford site and to make slow uranium isotope separation the only way to prepare fissile material suitable for use in bombs. To respond, Oppenheimer implemented, in August, a sweeping reorganization of the laboratory to focus on development of an implosion-type weapon and appointed George Kistiakowsky head of the implosion department. He was a professor at Harvard and an expert on precise use of explosives.

The basic concept of implosion is to use chemical explosives to crush a chunk of fissile material into a critical mass, where neutron multiplication leads to a nuclear chain reaction, releasing a large amount of energy. Cylindrical implosive configurations had been studied by Seth Neddermeyer, but von Neumann, who had experience with shaped charges used in armor-piercing ammunition, was a vocal advocate of spherical implosion driven by explosive lenses. He realized that the symmetry and speed with which implosion compressed the plutonium were critical issues, and enlisted Ulam to help design lens configurations that would provide nearly spherical implosion. Within an implosion, because of enormous pressures and high temperatures, solid materials behave much like fluids. This meant that hydrodynamical calculations were needed to predict and minimize asymmetries that would spoil a nuclear detonation. Of these calculations, Ulam said:"The hydrodynamical problem was simply stated, but very difficult to calculate – not only in detail, but even in order of magnitude. In this discussion, I stressed pure pragmatism and the necessity to get a heuristic survey of the problem by simple-minded brute force, rather than by massive numerical work."

Nevertheless, with the primitive facilities available at the time, Ulam and von Neumann did carry out numerical computations that led to a satisfactory design. This motivated their advocacy of a powerful computational capability at Los Alamos, which began during the war years, continued through the cold war, and still exists. Otto Frisch remembered Ulam as "a brilliant Polish topologist with a charming French wife. At once he told me that he was a pure mathematician who had sunk so low that his latest paper actually contained numbers with decimal points!"

Statistics of branching and multiplicative processes
Even the inherent statistical fluctuations of neutron multiplication within a chain reaction have implications with regard to implosion speed and symmetry. In November 1944, David Hawkins and Ulam addressed this problem in a report entitled "Theory of Multiplicative Processes". This report, which invokes probability-generating functions, is also an early entry in the extensive literature on statistics of branching and multiplicative processes. In 1948, its scope was extended by Ulam and Everett.

Early in the Manhattan project, Enrico Fermi's attention was focused on the use of reactors to produce plutonium. In September 1944, he arrived at Los Alamos, shortly after breathing life into the first Hanford reactor, which had been poisoned by a xenon isotope. Soon after Fermi's arrival, Teller's "Super" bomb group, of which Ulam was a part, was transferred to a new division headed by Fermi. Fermi and Ulam formed a relationship that became very fruitful after the war.

Post war Los Alamos
In September 1945, Ulam left Los Alamos to become an associate professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In January 1946, he suffered an acute attack of encephalitis, which put his life in danger, but which was alleviated by emergency brain surgery. During his recuperation, many friends visited, including Nicholas Metropolis from Los Alamos and the famous mathematician Paul Erdős, who remarked: "Stan, you are just like before." This was encouraging, because Ulam was concerned about the state of his mental faculties, for he had lost the ability to speak during the crisis. Another friend, Gian-Carlo Rota, asserted in a 1987 article that the attack changed Ulam's personality: afterwards, he turned from rigorous pure mathematics to more speculative conjectures concerning the application of mathematics to physics and biology; Rota also cites Ulam's former collaborator Paul Stein as noting that Ulam was sloppier in his clothing afterwards, and John Oxtoby as noting that Ulam before the encephalitis could work for hours on end doing calculations, while when Rota worked with him, was reluctant to solve even a quadratic equation. This assertion was not accepted by Françoise Aron Ulam.

By late April 1946, Ulam had recovered enough to attend a secret conference at Los Alamos to discuss thermonuclear weapons. Those in attendance included Ulam, von Neumann, Metropolis, Teller, Stan Frankel, and others. Throughout his participation in the Manhattan Project, Teller's efforts had been directed toward the development of a "super" weapon based on nuclear fusion, rather than toward development of a practical fission bomb. After extensive discussion, the participants reached a consensus that his ideas were worthy of further exploration. A few weeks later, Ulam received an offer of a position at Los Alamos from Metropolis and Robert D. Richtmyer, the new head of its theoretical division, at a higher salary, and the Ulams returned to Los Alamos.

Monte Carlo method
Late in the war, under the sponsorship of von Neumann, Frankel and Metropolis began to carry out calculations on the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Shortly after returning to Los Alamos, Ulam participated in a review of results from these calculations. Earlier, while playing solitaire during his recovery from surgery, Ulam had thought about playing hundreds of games to estimate statistically the probability of a successful outcome. With ENIAC in mind, he realized that the availability of computers made such statistical methods very practical. John von Neumann immediately saw the significance of this insight. In March 1947 he proposed a statistical approach to the problem of neutron diffusion in fissionable material. Because Ulam had often mentioned his uncle, Michał Ulam, "who just had to go to Monte Carlo" to gamble, Metropolis dubbed the statistical approach "The Monte Carlo method". Metropolis and Ulam published the first unclassified paper on the Monte Carlo method in 1949.

Fermi, learning of Ulam's breakthrough, devised an analog computer known as the Monte Carlo trolley, later dubbed the FERMIAC. The device performed a mechanical simulation of random diffusion of neutrons. As computers improved in speed and programmability, these methods became more useful. In particular, many Monte Carlo calculations carried out on modern massively parallel supercomputers are embarrassingly parallel applications, whose results can be very accurate.

Teller–Ulam design
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first fission bomb, the RDS-1. Created under the supervision of Lavrentiy Beria, who sought to duplicate the US effort, this weapon was nearly identical to Fat Man, for its design was based on information provided by spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass. In response, on 31 January 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced a crash program to develop a fusion bomb.

To advocate an aggressive development program, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez came to Los Alamos, where they conferred with Norris Bradbury, the laboratory director, and with George Gamow, Edward Teller, and Ulam. Soon, these three became members of a short-lived committee appointed by Bradbury to study the problem, with Teller as chairman. At this time, research on the use of a fission weapon to create a fusion reaction had been ongoing since 1942, but the design was still essentially the one originally proposed by Teller. His concept was to put tritium and/or deuterium in close proximity to a fission bomb, with the hope that the heat and intense flux of neutrons released when the bomb exploded, would ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Reactions of these isotopes of hydrogen are of interest because the energy per unit mass of fuel released by their fusion is much larger than that from fission of heavy nuclei.

Because the results of calculations based on Teller's concept were discouraging, many scientists believed it could not lead to a successful weapon, while others had moral and economic grounds for not proceeding. Consequently, several senior people of the Manhattan Project opposed development, including Bethe and Oppenheimer. To clarify the situation, Ulam and von Neumann resolved to do new calculations to determine whether Teller's approach was feasible. To carry out these studies, von Neumann decided to use electronic computers: ENIAC at Aberdeen, a new computer, MANIAC, at Princeton, and its twin, which was under construction at Los Alamos. Ulam enlisted Everett to follow a completely different approach, one guided by physical intuition. Françoise Ulam was one of a cadre of women "computers" who carried out laborious and extensive computations of thermonuclear scenarios on mechanical calculators, supplemented and confirmed by Everett's slide rule. Ulam and Fermi collaborated on further analysis of these scenarios. The results showed that, in workable configurations, a thermonuclear reaction would not ignite, and if ignited, it would not be self-sustaining. Ulam had used his expertise in combinatorics to analyze the chain reaction in deuterium, which was much more complicated than the ones in uranium and plutonium, and he concluded that no self-sustaining chain reaction would take place at the (low) densities that Teller was considering. In late 1950, these conclusions were confirmed by von Neumann's results.

In January 1951, Ulam had another idea: to channel the mechanical shock of a nuclear explosion so as to compress the fusion fuel. On the recommendation of his wife, Ulam discussed this idea with Bradbury and Mark before he told Teller about it. Almost immediately, Teller saw its merit, but noted that soft X-rays from the fission bomb would compress the thermonuclear fuel more strongly than mechanical shock and suggested ways to enhance this effect. On 9 March 1951, Teller and Ulam submitted a joint report describing these innovations. A few weeks later, Teller suggested placing a fissile rod or cylinder at the center of the fusion fuel. The detonation of this "spark plug" would help to initiate and enhance the fusion reaction. The design based on these ideas, called staged radiation implosion, has become the standard way to build thermonuclear weapons. It is often described as the "Teller–Ulam design".

In September 1951, after a series of differences with Bradbury and other scientists, Teller resigned from Los Alamos, and returned to the University of Chicago. At about the same time, Ulam went on leave as a visiting professor at Harvard for a semester. Although Teller and Ulam submitted a joint report on their design and jointly applied for a patent on it, they soon became involved in a dispute over who deserved credit. After the war, Bethe returned to Cornell University, but he was deeply involved in the development of thermonuclear weapons as a consultant. In 1954, he wrote an article on the history of the H-bomb, which presents his opinion that both men contributed very significantly to the breakthrough. This balanced view is shared by others who were involved, including Mark and Fermi, but Teller persistently attempted to downplay Ulam's role. "After the H-bomb was made," Bethe recalled, "reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother, because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife."

With the basic fusion reactions confirmed, and with a feasible design in hand, there was nothing to prevent Los Alamos from testing a thermonuclear device. On 1 November 1952, the first thermonuclear explosion occurred when Ivy Mike was detonated on Enewetak Atoll, within the US Pacific Proving Grounds. This device, which used liquid deuterium as its fusion fuel, was immense and utterly unusable as a weapon. Nevertheless, its success validated the Teller–Ulam design, and stimulated intensive development of practical weapons.

Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem
When Ulam returned to Los Alamos, his attention turned away from weapon design and toward the use of computers to investigate problems in physics and mathematics. With John Pasta, who helped Metropolis to bring MANIAC on line in March 1952, he explored these ideas in a report "Heuristic Studies in Problems of Mathematical Physics on High Speed Computing Machines", which was submitted on 9 June 1953. It treated several problems that cannot be addressed within the framework of traditional analytic methods: billowing of fluids, rotational motion in gravitating systems, magnetic lines of force, and hydrodynamic instabilities.

Soon, Pasta and Ulam became experienced with electronic computation on MANIAC, and by this time, Enrico Fermi had settled into a routine of spending academic years at the University of Chicago and summers at Los Alamos. During these summer visits, Pasta, Ulam, and Mary Tsingou, a programmer in the MANIAC group, joined him to study a variation of the classic problem of a string of masses held together by springs that exert forces linearly proportional to their displacement from equilibrium. Fermi proposed to add to this force a nonlinear component, which could be chosen to be proportional to either the square or cube of the displacement, or to a more complicated "broken linear" function. This addition is the key element of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem, which is often designated by the abbreviation FPUT.

A classical spring system can be described in terms of vibrational modes, which are analogous to the harmonics that occur on a stretched violin string. If the system starts in a particular mode, vibrations in other modes do not develop. With the nonlinear component, Fermi expected energy in one mode to transfer gradually to other modes, and eventually, to be distributed equally among all modes. This is roughly what began to happen shortly after the system was initialized with all its energy in the lowest mode, but much later, essentially all the energy periodically reappeared in the lowest mode. This behavior is very different from the expected equipartition of energy. It remained mysterious until 1965, when Kruskal and Zabusky showed that, after appropriate mathematical transformations, the system can be described by the Korteweg–de Vries equation, which is the prototype of nonlinear partial differential equations that have soliton solutions. This means that FPUT behavior can be understood in terms of solitons.

Nuclear propulsion
Starting in 1955, Ulam and Frederick Reines considered nuclear propulsion of aircraft and rockets. This is an attractive possibility, because the nuclear energy per unit mass of fuel is a million times greater than that available from chemicals. From 1955 to 1972, their ideas were pursued during Project Rover, which explored the use of nuclear reactors to power rockets. In response to a question by Senator John O. Pastore at a congressional committee hearing on "Outer Space Propulsion by Nuclear Energy", on January 22, 1958, Ulam replied that "the future as a whole of mankind is to some extent involved inexorably now with going outside the globe."

Ulam and C. J. Everett also proposed, in contrast to Rover's continuous heating of rocket exhaust, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion. Project Orion was a study of this idea. It began in 1958 and ended in 1965, after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere and in space. Work on this project was spearheaded by physicist Freeman Dyson, who commented on the decision to end Orion in his article, "Death of a Project".

Bradbury appointed Ulam and John H. Manley as research advisors to the laboratory director in 1957. These newly created positions were on the same administrative level as division leaders, and Ulam held his until he retired from Los Alamos. In this capacity, he was able to influence and guide programs in many divisions: theoretical, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, weapons, health, Rover, and others.

In addition to these activities, Ulam continued to publish technical reports and research papers. One of these introduced the Fermi–Ulam model, an extension of Fermi's theory of the acceleration of cosmic rays. Another, with Paul Stein and Mary Tsingou, titled "Quadratic Transformations", was an early investigation of chaos theory and is considered the first published use of the phrase "chaotic behavior".

Return to academia
During his years at Los Alamos, Ulam was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1951 to 1952, MIT from 1956 to 1957, the University of California, San Diego, in 1963, and the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1961 to 1962 and 1965 to 1967. In 1967, the last of these positions became permanent, when Ulam was appointed Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Colorado. He kept a residence in Santa Fe, which made it convenient to spend summers at Los Alamos as a consultant. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

In Colorado, where he rejoined his friends Gamow, Richtmyer, and Hawkins, Ulam's research interests turned toward biology. In 1968, recognizing this emphasis, the University of Colorado School of Medicine appointed Ulam as Professor of Biomathematics, and he held this position until his death. With his Los Alamos colleague Robert Schrandt he published a report, "Some Elementary Attempts at Numerical Modeling of Problems Concerning Rates of Evolutionary Processes", which applied his earlier ideas on branching processes to evolution. Another, report, with William Beyer, Temple F. Smith, and M. L. Stein, titled "Metrics in Biology", introduced new ideas about numerical taxonomy and evolutionary distances.

When he retired from Colorado in 1975, Ulam began to spend winter semesters at the University of Florida, where he was a graduate research professor. In 1976, he was awarded the Commander's Cross with the Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the Polish government-in-exile in London. Except for sabbaticals at the University of California, Davis from 1982 to 1983, and at Rockefeller University from 1980 to 1984, this pattern of spending summers in Colorado and Los Alamos and winters in Florida continued until Ulam died of an apparent heart attack in Santa Fe on 13 May 1984. Paul Erdős noted that "he died suddenly of heart failure, without fear or pain, while he could still prove and conjecture." In 1987, Françoise Ulam deposited his papers with the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia. She continued to live in Santa Fe until she died in 2011, at the age of 93. Both Françoise and her husband were buried with her family in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Challenge to economics
Alfred Marshall and his disciples dominated economic theory until the end of WWII. With the Cold War, the theory changed, emphasizing that a market economy was superior and the only sensible way. In Paul Samuelson's "Economics: An Introductory Analysis", 1948, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was only a footnote. In later editions, it became the central theme. As Samuelson remembers, all this was challenged by Stanislaw Ulam: "[Y]ears ago... I was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard along with the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Ulam, who was to become an originator of the Monte Carlo method and co-discoverer of the hydrogen-bomb,... used to tease me by saying, 'Name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.' This was the test that I always failed. But now, some thirty years later ... an appropriate answer occurs to me: The Ricardian theory of comparative advantage ... That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them."

Impact and legacy
Ulam participated in the creation of a hydrogen bomb as part of the Los Alamos Laboratory nuclear project. From the publication of his first paper as a student in 1929 until his death, Ulam was constantly writing on mathematics. The list of Ulam's publications includes more than 150 papers. Topics represented by a significant number of papers are: set theory (including measurable cardinals and abstract measures), topology, functional analysis, transformation theory, ergodic theory, group theory, projective algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.

Notable results of this work are:

 * Borsuk–Ulam theorem
 * Mazur–Ulam theorem
 * Kuratowski–Ulam theorem
 * Hyers–Ulam–Rassias stability
 * Lucky number
 * Ulam spiral

 * Ulam conjecture (in Number Theory)
 * Ulam conjecture (in Graph theory)
 * Ulam's packing conjecture
 * Ulam's game
 * Ulam matrix
 * Ulam numbers

Ulam played pivotal role in the development of thermonuclear weapons. According to Françoise Ulam: "Stan would reassure me that, barring accidents, the H-bomb rendered nuclear war impossible." In 1980, Ulam and his wife appeared in the television documentary The Day After Trinity.

The Monte Carlo method has become a ubiquitous and standard approach to computation, and the method has been applied to a vast number of scientific problems. In addition to problems in physics and mathematics, the method has been applied to finance, social science, environmental risk assessment, linguistics, radiation therapy, and sports.

The Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem is credited not only as "the birth of experimental mathematics", but also as inspiration for the vast field of Nonlinear Science. In his Lilienfeld Prize lecture, David K. Campbell noted this relationship and described how FPUT gave rise to ideas in chaos, solitons, and dynamical systems. In 1980, Donald Kerr, laboratory director at Los Alamos, with the strong support of Ulam and Mark Kac, founded the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS). In 1985, CNLS initiated the Stanislaw M. Ulam Distinguished Scholar program, which provides an annual award that enables a noted scientist to spend a year carrying out research at Los Alamos.

The fiftieth anniversary of the original FPUT paper was the subject of the March 2005 issue of the journal Chaos, and the topic of the 25th Annual International Conference of CNLS. The University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Florida supported the Ulam Quarterly, which was active from 1992 to 1996, and which was one of the first online mathematical journals. Florida's Department of Mathematics has sponsored, since 1998, the annual Ulam Colloquium Lecture, and in March 2009, the Ulam Centennial Conference.

Ulam's work on non-Euclidean distance metrics in the context of molecular biology made a significant contribution to sequence analysis and his contributions in theoretical biology are considered watersheds in the development of cellular automata theory, population biology, pattern recognition, and biometrics generally (David Sankoff, however, challenged conclusions of Walter by writing that Ulam had only modest influence on early development of sequence alignment methods. ). Colleagues noted that some of his greatest contributions were in clearly identifying problems to be solved and general techniques for solving them.

In 1987, Los Alamos issued a special issue of its Science publication, which summarized his accomplishments, and which appeared, in 1989, as the book From Cardinals to Chaos. Similarly, in 1990, the University of California Press issued a compilation of mathematical reports by Ulam and his Los Alamos collaborators: Analogies Between Analogies. During his career, Ulam was awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh.

In 2021, German film director Thorsten Klein made a film adaptation of the book Adventures of a Mathematician about Ulam's life.

Ulam is the grandfather of Rebecca Weiner, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Stanisław Ulam


text:
User talk:Brooke Vibber

'''I have declared talk page bankruptcy! All old messages deleted. :) --brion (talk) 13 January 2023 (UTC)'''

How to get in touch with me
Feel free to leave me messages here about articles and such on Wikipedia, but if you need to prod me about a tech issue I might not see your message here. You'll get a speedier response from regular channels these days, I'm mostly doing research and tech debt/documentation debt cleanup. :)

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Mast303 (talk) 05:23, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

A kitten for you!
Thank you for working hard to keep Wikipedia running!

I definitely couldn't do the "hardcore techy stuff" that you do (at best, I can manage the most basic webpage coding imaginable...), so I'm glad there are people like you who know how to make this website easier and more user-friendly for everyone!

Keep up the great work!! :)

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Invitation to join the Twenty Year Society
Dear ,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Twenty Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for twenty years or more.

Best regards,  Chris Troutman  ( talk )  18:45, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

 * Oh wow it has been 20+ years hasn't it :D --brooke (talk) 20:59, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

title: User talk:Brooke Vibber


text:
György Dalos

György Dalos (born 23 September 1943) is a Hungarian Jewish writer and historian. He is best known for his novel 1985, and The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin.

Life
Dalos was born in Budapest and spent his childhood with his grandparents, as his father had died in 1945 in a labor camp, where he had been sent to as a Jew during World War II. From 1962 to 1967, he studied history at the Lomonossov University in Moscow. He then returned to his native town Budapest to work as a museologist. In 1968, Dalos was accused of "Maoist activities" and was handed seven months prison on probation and a Berufsverbot (professional disqualification) and a publication ban; due to that, he worked as a translator. In 1977, he was among the founders of the opposition movement against the Communist regime of Hungary. In 1988/89 he was co-editor of the East German underground opposition paper Ostkreuz. From 1995 to 1999, Dalos was head of the Institute for Hungarian Culture in Berlin. Since 2009 he is member of the International Council of Austrian Service Abroad.

Dalos lived in Vienna from 1987 to 1995. Since 1995, he has lived in Berlin as a freelance publisher and editor.

Awards

 * 2010 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding

Work

 * 1985 (1983) is a sequel to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This novel begins with the death of Big Brother and reflects an intermediate period between 1984 and a more optimistic future characterized with a decline in orthodoxy of the totalitarian system, struggles of the ensuing powers and the near destruction of the Oceania air force by Eurasia.
 * The Circumcision (1990)
 * Proletarier aller Lander, entschuldigt mich! (Ende des Ostblockwitzes) (Proletariats of all countries, I apologize! (End of the East Block joke)) (1993)
 * The Guest from the Future (1996)
 * Der Gottsucher (Godseeker) (1999)
 * Ungarn in der Nusschale. Geschichte meines Landes (Hungary in a Nutshell. History of My Country) (2004). In Hungary in a Nutshell Dalos prophetically warns his homeland not to attempt to solve social problems in an authoritarian manner.
 * Die Balaton Brigade (2006)
 * 1956: Aufstand in Ungarn [1956: Uprising in Hungary] (2006)
 * Jugenstil (Art Nouveau) (2007)

Articles
 * Zum Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa: Ein Blick auf Ungarn und die DDR, in: Robertson-von Trotha, Caroline Y. (ed.): Herausforderung Demokratie. Demokratisch, parlamentarisch, gut? (= Kulturwissenschaft interdisziplinär/Interdisciplinary Studies on Culture and Society, Vol. 6), Baden-Baden 2011

title: György Dalos


text:
Eldred v. Ashcroft

Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.

Internet publisher Eric Eldred was the lead petitioner, and was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work (including Dover Publications) and many amici including the Free Software Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Bureau of National Affairs, and the College Art Association. Eldred was represented by Lawrence Lessig and a team at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Supporting the law were United States Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, along with a set of amici including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, ASCAP and Broadcast Music Incorporated.

Background
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or CTEA) extended existing copyright terms by an additional 20 years from the terms set by the Copyright Act of 1976. The law affected both new and existing works (making it both a prospective extension as well as a retroactive one). Specifically, for works published before January 1, 1978, and still in copyright on October 27, 1998, the term was extended to 95 years. For works authored by individuals on or after January 1, 1978 (including new works), the copyright term was extended to equal the life of the author plus 70 years. For works authored by joint authors, the copyright term was extended to the life of the last surviving author plus 70 years. In the case of works-for-hire, anonymous or pseudonymous works, the term was set at 95 years from the date of first publication, or 120 years from creation.

The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Law of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.

The lead petitioner, Eric Eldred, is an Internet publisher. Eldred was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work. These included Dover Publications, a commercial publisher of paperback books; Luck's Music Library, Inc. and Edwin F. Kalmus & Co., Inc., publishers of orchestral sheet music; and many amici including the Free Software Foundation; Tri-Horn International of Boston, Massachusetts, a golf publishing and technology company; the American Association of Law Libraries; the Bureau of National Affairs; and the College Art Association.

Supporting the law were the U.S. government, represented by the Attorney General in an ex officio capacity (originally Janet Reno, later replaced by John Ashcroft), along with a set of amici including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, ASCAP, and Broadcast Music Incorporated.

District court
The original complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on January 11, 1999. The plaintiffs' argument was threefold:

Plaintiffs argued that by reading this formulation so as to allow for any number of retroactive extensions, Congress could in practice guarantee an unlimited period of copyright protection, thus thwarting the intent of the clause.
 * 1) That by retroactively extending copyright terms, Congress had violated the requirements of the Constitution's Copyright Clause, which gives Congress the following power: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
 * 1) That any copyright law must be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring a balance between freedom of speech and the interests of copyright.
 * 2) That the doctrine of public trust requires the government to show a public benefit to any transfer of public property into private hands, and that the CTEA violates this doctrine by withdrawing material from the public domain.

In response, the government argued that Congress does indeed have the latitude to retroactively extend terms, so long as the individual extensions are also for "limited Times", as required by the Constitution. As an argument for this position, they referred to the Copyright Act of 1790, the first Federal copyright legislation, which applied Federal protection to existing works. Furthermore, they argued, neither the First Amendment nor the doctrine of public trust is applicable to copyright cases.

On October 28, 1999, Judge June Green issued a brief opinion rejecting all three of the petitioners' arguments. On the first count, she wrote that Congress had the power to extend terms as it wished, as long as the terms themselves were of limited duration. On the second count, she rejected the notion of First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, based on her interpretation of Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., v. Nation Enterprises, an earlier Supreme Court decision. On the third count, she rejected the notion that public trust doctrine was applicable to copyright law.

Court of Appeals
The plaintiffs appealed the decision of the district court to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, filing their initial brief on May 22, 2000, and arguing the case on October 5 of the same year in front of a three-judge panel. Arguments were similar to those made in the district court, except for those regarding the public trust doctrine, which were not included in the appeal.

Instead, the plaintiffs extended their argument on the copyright clause to note that the clause requires Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and argued that retroactive extensions do not directly serve this purpose in the standard quid pro quo previously required by the courts.

The case was decided on February 16, 2001. The appeals court upheld the decision of the district court in a 2–1 opinion. In his dissent, Judge David Sentelle agreed with the plaintiffs that CTEA was indeed unconstitutional based on the "limited Times" requirement. Supreme Court precedent, he argued, held that one must be able to discern an "outer limit" to a limited power; in the case of retrospective copyright extensions, Congress could continue to extend copyright terms indefinitely through a set of limited extensions, thus rendering the "limited times" requirement meaningless.

Following this ruling, plaintiffs petitioned for a rehearing en banc (in front of the full panel of nine judges). This petition was rejected, 7–2, with Judges Sentelle and David Tatel dissenting.

Supreme Court
On October 11, 2001, the plaintiffs filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States. On February 19, 2002, the Court granted certiorari, agreeing to hear the case.

Oral arguments were presented on October 9, 2002. Lead counsel for the plaintiff was Lawrence Lessig; the government's case was argued by Solicitor General Theodore Olson.

Lessig focused the Plaintiffs' brief to emphasize the Copyright Clause restriction, as well as the First Amendment argument from the Court of Appeals case. The decision to emphasize the Copyright Clause argument was based on both the minority opinion of Judge Sentelle in the appeals court, and on several recent Supreme Court decisions authored by Chief Justice William Rehnquist: United States v. Lopez (1996) and United States v. Morrison (2000).

In both of those decisions, Rehnquist, along with four of the Court's more conservative justices, held Congressional legislation unconstitutional, because that legislation exceeded the limits of the Constitution's Commerce Clause. This profound reversal of precedent, Lessig argued, could not be limited to only one of the enumerated powers. If the court felt that it had the power to review legislation under the Commerce Clause, Lessig argued, then the Copyright clause deserved similar treatment, or at very least a "principled reason" must be stated for according such treatment to only one of the enumerated powers.

On January 15, 2003, the Court held the CTEA constitutional by a 7–2 decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsburg, relied heavily on the Copyright Acts of 1790, 1831, 1909, and 1976 as precedent for retroactive extensions. One of the arguments supporting the act was that life expectancy has significantly increased among the human population since the 18th century, and therefore copyright law needed extending as well. However, the major argument for the act that carried over into the case was that the Constitution specified that Congress only needed to set time limits for copyright, the length of which was left to their discretion. Thus, as long as the limit is not "forever", any limit set by Congress can be deemed constitutional.

A key factor in the CTEA's passage was a 1993 European Union (EU) directive instructing EU members to establish a baseline copyright term of life plus 70 years and to deny this longer term to the works of any non-EU country whose laws did not secure the same extended term. By extending the baseline United States copyright term, Congress sought to ensure that American authors would receive the same copyright protection in Europe as their European counterparts.

The Supreme Court declined to address Lessig's contention that Lopez and Morrison offered precedent for enforcing the Copyright clause, and instead reiterated the lower court's reasoning that a retroactive term extension can satisfy the "limited Times" provision in the Copyright Clause, as long as the extension itself is limited instead of perpetual. Furthermore, the Court refused to apply the proportionality standards of the Fourteenth Amendment or the free-speech standards in the First Amendment to limit Congress's ability to confer copyrights for limited terms.

Justice Breyer dissented, arguing that the CTEA amounted to a grant of perpetual copyright that undermined public interests. While the constitution grants Congress power to extend copyright terms in order to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", CTEA granted precedent to continually renew copyright terms making them virtually perpetual. Justice Breyer argued that it is highly unlikely any artist will be more inclined to produce work knowing their great-grandchildren will receive royalties. With regard to retroactive copyright extension, he considered it foolish to apply the government's argument that income received from royalties allows artists to produce more work saying, "How will extension help today's Noah Webster create new works 50 years after his death?" He also attacked the idea that the fair use defense would efficiently solve the First Amendment issue, as the defense could not help "those who wish to obtain from electronic databases material that is not there", e.g. teachers searching online for material to be used in the class (and finding that the ideal material has been deleted from the database).

In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens also challenged the virtue of an individual reward, analyzing it from the perspective of patent law. He argued that the focus on compensation results only in "frustrating the legitimate members of the public who want to make use of it (a completed invention) in a free market". Further, the compelling need to encourage creation is proportionally diminished once a work is already created. Yet while a formula pairing commercial viability to duration of protection may be said to produce more economically efficient results in respect of high technology inventions with shorter shelf-lives, the same perhaps cannot be said for certain forms of copyrighted works, for which the present value of expenditures relating to creation depend less on scientific equipment and research and development programs and more on unquantifiable creativity.

Lessig expressed surprise that no decision was authored by Chief Justice Rehnquist or by any of the other four justices who supported the Lopez or Morrison decisions. Lessig later expressed regret that he based his argument on precedent rather than attempting to demonstrate that the weakening of the public domain would cause harm to the economic health of the country.

Later developments
Within a year of Eldred, it was serving as decisive precedent. Two cases, Luck’s Music Library, Inc. v. Ashcroft and Peters and Golan v. Ashcroft and Peters, challenged the constitutionality of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act on the grounds that its "restoration amendment," which provided copyright restriction to foreign works that were in the public domain because foreign works were formerly not copyrightable, violated the First Amendment rights of those who would no longer be able to perform the works without observing copyright. The court cited Eldred and dismissed Luck's Music on the grounds that the First Amendment did not protect the ability to use others' words as much as it does protect one's ability to use their own. Golan v. Ashcroft and Peters's Uruguay Round portion survived a motion to dismiss even though its own challenge to the Sonny Bono Act did not. That case culminated in Golan v. Holder, which held that there was nothing in the Constitution preventing the government from taking works out of the public domain.

A 2007 case, Kahle v. Gonzales, worked from the Eldred v. Ashcroft opinion to argue that a change in copyright law as drastic as the change from opt-in to opt-out required a review in regard to freedom of speech. The plaintiffs, represented by Lawrence Lessig, argued that the limitations placed on speech and expression by copyright were drastically expanded and possibly too limiting. The Ninth Circuit determined that the argument was too similar to the one adjudicated in Eldred and dismissed the case.

title: Eldred v. Ashcroft