Arianna W. Rosenbluth

Arianna Rosenbluth (née Wright) is an American physicist and computer scientist who contributed to the development of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. An author on the paper Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines in which the algorithm was proposed, she wrote the first full implementation of the widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for the MANIAC I computer.

She studied for her undergraduate degree at the Rice Institute, obtaining her Bachelor of Science in 1946, and obtained her Master of Arts from Radcliffe College in 1947.

She completed her PhD in physics under the supervision of John Hasbrouck Van Vleck at Harvard at the age of 22 in 1949, with a thesis entitled Some Aspects of Paramagnetic Relaxation. She was one of three students of van Vleck at the time, the other two being the future Nobel Laureate Philip Warren Anderson and the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.She then won an Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellowship to Stanford University. She subsequently moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she worked especially on computational aspects of hydrogen bomb development.She married plasma physicist and co-originator of the Metropolis algorithm Marshall Rosenbluth in 1951. They had four children, and worked together on Monte Carlo simulations of liquids for six years.