Timeline of computational physics

The following timeline starts with the invention of the modern computer in the late interwar period.

1930s

• John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry 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 and Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL), respectively.^[1]
• Monte Carlo simulation (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century by Jack Dongarra and Francis Sullivan in the 2000 issue of Computing in Science and Engineering)^[2] is invented at Los Alamos National Laboratory by John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis.^[3][4][5]
• First hydrodynamic simulations performed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.^[6][7]
• Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.^[8][9]

1950s

• Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.^[10] Also, important earlier independent work by Berni Alder and Stan Frankel.^[11][12]
• Enrico Fermi, Ulam and John Pasta with help from Mary Tsingou, discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam-Tsingou problem.^[13]
• Research initiated into percolation theory.^[14]
• Molecular dynamics is formulated by Alder and Tom E. Wainwright.^[15]

1960s

• Using computational investigations of the 3-body problem, Michael Minovitch formulates the gravity assist method.^[16][17]
• Glauber dynamics is invented for the Ising model by Roy J. Glauber.^[18]
• Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory.^[19]
• Molecular dynamics is independently invented by Aneesur Rahman.^[20]
• Walter Kohn instigates the development of density functional theory (with L.J. Sham and Pierre Hohenberg),^[21][22] for which he shared the Nobel Chemistry Prize (1998).^[23]
• Martin Kruskal and Norman Zabusky follow up the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem with further numerical experiments, and coin the term "soliton".^[24][25]
• Kawasaki dynamics is invented for the Ising model.^[26]
• Loup Verlet (re)discovers a numerical integration algorithm,^[27] (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,^[28] hence the alternative names Störmer's method or the Verlet-Störmer method) for dynamics, and the Verlet list.^[27]

1970s

• Computer algebra replicates the work of Boris Delaunay in Lunar theory.^{[29][30][31][32][33]}
• Martinus Veltman's calculations at CERN lead him and Gerard 't Hooft to valuable insights into renormalizability of electroweak theory.^[34] The computation has been cited as a key reason for the award of the Nobel Physics Prize that has been given to both.^[35]
• Jean Hardy, Yves Pomeau and Olivier de Pazzis introduce the first lattice gas model, abbreviated as the HPP model after its authors.^[36][37] These later evolved into lattice Boltzmann models.
• Kenneth G. Wilson shows that continuum quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is recovered for an infinitely large lattice with its sites infinitesimally close to one another, thereby beginning lattice QCD.^[38]

1980s

• Italian physicists Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello invent the Car–Parrinello method.^[39]
• Swendsen–Wang algorithm is invented in the field of Monte Carlo simulations.^[40]
• Fast multipole method is invented by Vladimir Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).^[41][42][43]
• Ullli Wolff invents the Wolff algorithm for statistical physics and Monte Carlo simulation.^[44]

See also

• Timeline of scientific computing
• Computational physics
• Important publications in computational physics