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.Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland. 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) is invented at Los Alamos National Laboratory by John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis. First hydrodynamic simulations performed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.

1950s Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. Also, important earlier independent work by Berni Alder and Stan Frankel.Unfortunately, Alder's thesis advisor was unimpressed, so Alder and Frankel delayed publication of their results until much later.Alder, B. J., Frankel, S. P., and Lewinson, B. A., J. Chem. Phys., 23, 3 (1955). Enrico Fermi, Ulam and John Pasta with help from Mary Tsingou, discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam-Tsingou problem.Fermi, E. (posthumously); Pasta, J.; Ulam, S. (1955) : Studies of Nonlinear Problems (accessed 25 Sep 2012). Los Alamos Laboratory Document LA-1940. Also appeared in 'Collected Works of Enrico Fermi', E. Segre ed., University of Chicago Press, Vol.II,978–988,1965. Recovered 21 December 2012 Research initiated into percolation theory.Broadbent, S. R.; Hammersley, J. M. (2008). "Percolation processes". Math. Proc. of the Camb. Philo. Soc.; 53 (3): 629. Molecular dynamics is formulated by Alder and Tom E. Wainwright.

1960s Using computational investigations of the 3-body problem, Michael Minovitch formulates the gravity assist method.Minovitch, Michael: "A method for determining interplanetary free-fall reconnaissance trajectories," Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technical Memo TM-312-130, pages 38-44 (23 August 1961).Christopher Riley and Dallas Campbell, 22 October 2012. "The maths that made Voyager possible" . BBC News Science and Environment. Recovered 16 June 2013. Glauber dynamics is invented for the Ising model by Roy J. Glauber.R. J. Glauber. "Time-dependent statistics of the Ising model, J. Math. Phys. 4 (1963), 294–307. Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory. Molecular dynamics is independently invented by Aneesur Rahman. Walter Kohn instigates the development of density functional theory (with L.J. Sham and Pierre Hohenberg), for which he shared the Nobel Chemistry Prize (1998). Martin Kruskal and Norman Zabusky follow up the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem with further numerical experiments, and coin the term "soliton".Zabusky, N. J.; Kruskal, M. D. (1965). "Interaction of 'solitons' in a collisionless plasma and the recurrence of initial states". Phys. Rev. Lett. 15 (6): 240–243. Bibcode 1965PhRvL..15..240Z. . Kawasaki dynamics is invented for the Ising model.K. Kawasaki, "Diffusion Constants near the Critical Point for Time-Dependent Ising Models. I. Phys. Rev. 145, 224 (1966) Loup Verlet (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 in Lunar theory. Martinus Veltman's calculations at CERN lead him and Gerard 't Hooft to valuable insights into renormalizability of electroweak theory.Frank Close. The Infinity Puzzle, pg 207. OUP, 2011. The computation has been cited as a key reason for the award of the Nobel Physics Prize that has been given to both.Stefan Weinzierl:- "Computer Algebra in Particle Physics." pgs 5–7. arXiv:hep-ph/0209234. All links accessed 1 January 2012. "Seminario Nazionale di Fisica Teorica", Parma, September 2002. Jean Hardy, Yves Pomeau and Olivier de Pazzis introduce the first lattice gas model, abbreviated as the HPP model after its authors.J. Hardy, Y. Pomeau, and O. de Pazzis (1973). "Time evolution of two-dimensional model system I: invariant states and time correlation functions". Journal of Mathematical Physics, 14:1746–1759.J. Hardy, O. de Pazzis, and Y. Pomeau (1976). "Molecular dynamics of a classical lattice gas: Transport properties and time correlation functions". Physical Review A, 13:1949–1961. 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.

1980s Italian physicists Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello invent the Car–Parrinello method. Swendsen–Wang algorithm is invented in the field of Monte Carlo simulations.Swendsen, R. H., and Wang, J.-S. (1987), Nonuniversal critical dynamics in Monte Carlo simulations, Phys. Rev. Lett., 58(2):86–88. Fast multipole method is invented by Vladimir Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).L. Greengard, The Rapid Evaluation of Potential Fields in Particle Systems, MIT, Cambridge, (1987).Rokhlin, Vladimir (1985). "Rapid Solution of Integral Equations of Classic Potential Theory." J. Computational Physics Vol. 60, pp. 187–207.L. Greengard and V. Rokhlin, "A fast algorithm for particle simulations," J. Comput. Phys., 73 (1987), no. 2, pp. 325–348. Ullli Wolff invents the Wolff algorithm for statistical physics and Monte Carlo simulation.Wolff, Ulli (1989), "Collective Monte Carlo Updating for Spin Systems", Physical Review Letters, 62 (4): 361

See also Timeline of scientific computing Computational physics Important publications in computational physics

Notes

References

External links The Monte Carlo Method: Classic Papers Monte Carlo Landmark Papers