Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines

Rosenbluth makes it clear that he and his wife Arianna did the work, and that Metropolis played no role in the development other than providing computer time.

Rosenbluth credits Teller with a crucial but early suggestion to "take advantage of statistical mechanics and take ensemble averages instead of following detailed kinematics".

The Rosenbluths would subsequently publish two additional, lesser-known papers using the Monte Carlo method,[5][6] while the other authors would not continue to work on the topic.

According to a perspective published nearly fifty years later by William L. Jorgensen, "Metropolis et al. introduced the samplic method and periodic boundary conditions that remain at the heart of Monte Carlo statistical mechanics simulations of fluids.

[7] In another perspective, it was said that although "the Metropolis algorithm began as a technique for attacking specific problems in numerical simulations of physical systems [...] later, the subject exploded as the scope of applications broadened in many surprising directions, including function minimization, computational geometry, and combinatorial counting.