Stan Frankel

Frankel helped develop computational techniques used in the nuclear research taking place at the time, notably making some of the early calculations relating to the diffusion of neutrons in a critical assembly of uranium with Eldred Nelson.

Mathematician Dana Mitchell noticed that the Marchant calculators broke under heavy use and persuaded Frankel and Nelson to order IBM 601 punched card machines.

[citation needed] In August 1945, Frankel and Nick Metropolis traveled to the Moore School of Engineering in Pennsylvania to learn how to program the ENIAC computer.

In the interest of improving upon the design of what became the SCM Cogito 240 and 240SR calculators, Frankel developed a new machine he called NIC-NAC, which was based on a microcoded architecture.

Frankel was contracted to develop a desktop electronic calculator for Diehl, and moved to West Germany to undertake the project.

In a 1947 paper in Physical Review, he and Metropolis predicted the utility of computers in replacing manual integration with iterative summation as a problem solving technique.

As head of a new Caltech digital computing group he worked with PhD candidate Berni Alder in 1949–1950 to develop what is now known as Monte Carlo analysis.

This left the major credit for the technique to a parallel project by a team including Teller and Metropolis who published similar work in the same journal in 1953.