Mary Tsingou Menzel, FPUT Programmer Long Denied Credit, Dies at 97
Updated
Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 5
Mary Tsingou Menzel, FPUT Programmer Long Denied Credit, Dies at 97
1 articles · Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 5
Summary
Mary Tsingou Menzel died Aug. 27 at her Los Alamos home at 97 after a career that helped define computational physics.
In the mid-1950s, she programmed the Los Alamos MANIAC computer for the experiment now called FPUT, whose unexpected results helped launch chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics.
For more than 50 years, the work was known only as the FPU problem, with Menzel mentioned in a footnote despite writing the code and running the computations.
A 2008 paper by physicist Thierry Dauxois pushed to restore her name, highlighting how women programmers at Cold War-era labs often did essential scientific work without equal recognition.