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She also continually asserts that she has never felt slighted by not being included in the naming of the problem. Still living in Los Alamos with her husband, Joe Menzel, she expresses surprise at the significance of the experiment she programmed almost 70 years ago. Mary Tsingou Menzel is a very humble scientific game changer.

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In the original Los Alamos report, a column lists вЂњwork byвЂќ the three authors plus Mary Tsingou, and the first page includes a footnote reading, вЂњWe thank Miss Mary Tsingou for efficient coding of the problems and for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine.вЂќ The experiment has historically been named the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem, or FPU, for the three physicists who authored the 1955 report, but many scientists now refer to it as the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem, or FPUT. This particular experiment, he says, вЂњwas one of humanityвЂ™s first attempts to see what lurks out in these borderlands.вЂќ вЂњNonlinearity is the great frontier of science,вЂќ says Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. The scientists were surprised by the results, and the experiment gave birth to the field of nonlinear science, which includes a wide array of scientific and mathematical areas of study, such as chaos theory. Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam thought the energy would spread out along the chain and eventually reach equilibrium, but it kept moving, never settling anywhere. Tsingou wrote an algorithm, programmed the MANIAC, and ran the simulation over and over, along the way making adjustments, debugging and altering input to compare results. This experiment on the MANIAC would allow scientists to virtually observe, for the first time, interactions between individual atoms.ДЇermi, Pasta and Ulam designed the experiment a programmer named Mary Tsingou made it happen. Interactions between atoms are universally nonlinear, but they couldnвЂ™t be observed with a microscope. The system, which resembled objects on a vibrating string, was important because it was nonlinear-unable to be solved by being broken into smaller pieces. They chose to simulate a chain of point masses connected by springs, designed to represent atoms connected by chemical bonds, then observe what happened to energy as it moved around on the chain. Fermi, Pasta and Ulam wanted to use their new problem-solving tool-computer simulation-to virtually zoom in on a system and observe atomistic interactions at the molecular level, with a realism that was not possible before. At the time, problems were solved by performing either laboratory experiments or mathematical calculations by hand. In 1952, at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, theoretical physicists Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam brainstormed ways to use the MANIAC, one of the worldвЂ™s first supercomputers, to solve scientific problems.

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