A Washington Post obituary highlights the remarkable life and career of UW–Madison alumna Mary Tsingou Menzel, who died recently at age 97.

The obituary recounts how Menzel was among the many women who joined the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico during the early years of the Cold War. Hired to perform mathematical calculations by hand and later to program some of the world’s earliest computers, she went on to play a key role in a landmark computational physics experiment now known as the FPUT problem. The experiment uncovered unexpected physical behaviors that helped further the development of chaos theory and other fields.

As the obituary notes, at the time female coders often received little recognition for their contributions. When the FPUT findings were published, Menzel’s role was acknowledged only in a footnote thanking “Miss Mary Tsingou,” as she then known, “for efficient coding of the problems and for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine.”

For decades, the experiment was known as the FPU problem, named for its credited co-authors: Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam. Menzel’s initial was added in 2008, following the publication of a paper by French physicist Thierry Dauxois highlighting her contributions.

“It is time for a proper recognition of her work,” Dauxois wrote.

Menzel studied mathematics at UW–Madison and originally hoped to become a teacher. She graduated from the School of Education in 1951.

Read the full Washinton Post obituary to learn more about Menzel’s extraordinary life.