Name Mary Tsingou | ||
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Mary Tsingou (married name: Mary Tsingou-Menzel; born October 14, 1928) is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek ancestry. She is known for being one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and for work in conjunction with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became the inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing.
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Biography
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, her parents moved to the US from Bulgaria and were Greek. She spent several years in Bulgaria before returning to the US to attend high school and college. Menzel attended the University of Wisconsin where she majored in mathematics and education.
She is known in the computational physics community for having helped in the coding of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem at the Los Alamos National Laboratory while working as a programmer in the MANIAC group. The result was an important stepping stone for chaos theory.
After Fermi's death, James L. Tuck and Tsingou-Menzel repeated the original FPU results and provided strong indication that the nonlinear FPU problem might be integrable.
In 2008, a paper published in Physics Today called to rename the FPU problem to the FPUT problem to give her proper credit for her contribution. Subsequent papers referencing the FPUT problem reflect this change.