In 1952, Mary Tsingou programmed a Los Alamos experiment that helped change modern physics

Mathematician and programmer Mary Tsingou Menzel When mathematician and programmer Mary Tsingou Menzel sat down in 1952 at Los Alamos National Laboratory to code a complex physics problem on one of the world’s earliest digital computers, she was breaking new ground. Her work helped make possible a landmark experiment that went on to influence chaos theory, non-linear dynamics and modern scientific computing. Yet when the findings were published in a major 1955 paper, her name was missing from the title page and appeared only in a sentence at the bottom of the front page: "We wish to thank Miss Mary Tsingou for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine." It took more than half a century for the scientific community to formally recognise her contribution. Following her death on 27 August 2026 at her home in Los Alamos, New Mexico, aged 97, obituaries in major publications including The Washington Post and the Los Alamos Daily Post highlighted her important role in 20th-century physics. Born to Greek immigrant parents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 14 October 1928, Tsingou earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1951 before joining Lo...