Mary Tsingou

Mary Tsingou Menzel , née Tsingou, (born October 14, 1928 in Milwaukee ), is an American mathematician .

Mary Tsingou studied at the University of Wisconsin , where she received her bachelor's degree in 1951 , and at the University of Michigan , where she received her master's degree in 1955 . On the advice of one of her professors, she went to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1952 , as women were also employed there because of the Korean War . She initially worked in Rudolf Peierls 'group , where she performed manual calculations, but quickly switched to Nicholas Metropolis' group to work on the new MANIAC I computer .

In 1953, on MANIAC I, she performed the calculations for the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiment , one of the first numerical simulations carried out on a computer . Despite her seminal contribution, she is not listed as an author because she did not co-write the publication.

Later she continued to deal with the FPU problem, examined numerical solutions to the Schrödinger equation and worked together with John von Neumann on the mixing behavior of liquids. During the Reagan era, she did calculations for the Star Wars project .

In 1958 she married Joseph Menzel, whom she had met in Los Alamos and with whom she still lives there today.

literature

• Thierry Dauxois: Fermi, Pasta, Ulam, and a mysterious lady. In: arXiv . January 2008, p. 55