“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier”

Mary Tsingou Menzel, who has died at 97, played a central role in a Los Alamos physics experiment. A half-century later, she finally got her due.

In secondary school, matrices don’t get anything near a fair shake. In case it has been a while, matrices were those rectangular grids of numbers that look something like this:  In most secondary scho...