A 1955 Los Alamos computer experiment changed our understanding of chaos

In 1955, Mary Tsingou helped run a computational experiment at Los Alamos that revealed unexpected behavior in nonlinear systems—work that later became foundational to chaos theory and computational science.

This piece traces that history from early supercomputers and the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem to modern AI systems used to explore uncertainty in scientific research.

Flowchart

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reproduction-of-the-algo...

Reproduction of the algorithm used by Mary Tsingou to code the first numerical experiment. Note the date (5-20- 55) at the top right of the figure.

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/national-security-sc...

Very cool.

A visualization of the problem is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou_probl...