The 97-year-old Mary Tsingou Menzel, who programmed a Los Alamos experiment that helped change modern physics, died at her Los Angeles home in August 2026. In the 1950s, she played a significant role in solving a complex physics problem using one of the earliest computers. But initially, she was recognised only in a footnote for her computational work.
The findings of the landmark experiment were published in 1955 but her name was not listed along with other authors. What was astonishing was that the experiment was named after three male scientists. More than half a century later, the American mathematician and computer programmer received wider recognition for her role in the breakthrough, which helped shape modern computational physics and the study of nonlinear systems.
