[2] In 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for discoveries in controlled thermonuclear fusion, contributions to plasma physics, and work in computational statistical mechanics.

[5] During his first post-doctoral position at Stanford University (1949–1950), he derived the Rosenbluth formula, which was the basis of the analysis used by Robert Hofstadter in his Nobel prize-winning experimental investigation of electron scattering.

Hofstadter refers to this in his 1961 Nobel Lecture: "This behavior can be understood in terms of the theoretical scattering law developed by M. Rosenbluth in 1950".

In 1950 his doctoral advisor Edward Teller,[6] who is considered the father of the hydrogen bomb, recruited Rosenbluth to work at Los Alamos.

He had trouble sleeping, and was pondering the bomb design when he realised the scientists had made a calculating error that could result in a dud.

[8]In 1953, Rosenbluth derived the Metropolis algorithm,[9] based on generating a Markov chain which sampled fluid configurations according to the Boltzmann distribution.

For example, around 1980, he and coworkers produced a detailed analysis of the free electron laser, indicating how its spectral intensity can be optimized.