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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Mary P. Frankel was one of the “human computers” at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

In the spring of 1943, Frankel and her husband, Stan, an American physicist who later became a computer scientist, arrived at Los Alamos. Having received degrees in both psychology and mathematics, Mary became a junior scientist in the Theoretical Group known as T-5 under the leadership of Donald Flanders. Frankel supervised the women who operated the Marchant desk calculators, becoming an expert in using numerical methods to solve physical equations and in charge of setting up the problems for the staff to run on desk calculators. 

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