The year was 1945. Two earthshaking events took place: the successful test at Alamogordo and the building of the first electronic computer.
Their combined impact was to modify qualitatively the nature of global interactions between Russia and the West. No less perturbative were the changes wrought in all of academic research and in applied science.
On a less grand scale these events brought about a renascence of a mathematical technique known to the old guard as statistical sampling; in its new surroundings and owing to its nature, there was no denying its new name of the Monte Carlo method.