Mary Tsingou

Mary Tsingou (1928 to 2026), later Mary Tsingou-Menzel, was an American physicist and mathematician of Greek-Bulgarian descent. Born in Milwaukee, she took a bachelor degree in mathematics and education at the University of Wisconsin in 1951 and a master degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955. At Los Alamos National Laboratory she became one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer, and she is best known for devising and coding the simulation in the computer experiment run with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam. That analysis, long called the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem, became a stepping stone for chaos theory, scientific computing and soliton theory, and since 2008 it has been renamed the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem in recognition of her part. She later repeated the original results with James Tuck, became an early expert in Fortran, and retired from Los Alamos in 1991.