John Pasta

John Robert Pasta (1918 to 1981) was an American computational physicist and computer scientist, remembered for the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou experiment carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory, whose result was widely discussed among physicists and researchers in dynamical systems and chaos theory. He was born in New York City on October 22, 1918, the eldest of four children, and grew up in Queens. He attended Townsend Harris High School and entered City College of New York in 1935, later studying at New York University. He headed the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1964 to 1970, and he died in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1981.