Augusta H. Teller

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Augusta Maria "Mici" Teller (born Auguszta Mária Harkányi; April 30, 1909 – June 4, 2000) was a Hungarian‑American physicist and computer programmer who helped develop the Metropolis algorithm, an early and important method for computer simulations.

She grew up in Hungary. Her parents were Jewish but had converted to Christianity. After her father died, she and her brother Ede were adopted by a foster father and took the surname Schütz‑Harkányi. She studied mathematics at the University of Budapest and earned a teaching diploma in 1931. She then studied sociology and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh on a scholarship, earning a master’s degree in 1933.

In 1934 she married her longtime friend Edward Teller. The Tellers moved to the United States in 1935 after George Gamow invited Edward to teach at George Washington University. They became U.S. citizens in 1941 and had two children, Paul (born 1943) and Wendy (born 1946).

In 1943 Augusta joined Edward at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working part‑time in the computations division with other wives of Los Alamos staff under the Theoretical Division led by Hans Bethe. In 1944 her brother Suki was killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

In the late 1940s the Tellers moved to Chicago to work at Argonne National Laboratory. Augusta wrote an early version of the code for the MANIAC I computer. She was also a co‑author of the first paper introducing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations, though the final code used in the publication was written by Arianna Rosenbluth. The Tellers moved to California in the 1950s. She also ran a Bay Area Pilot Project scholarship program to support students pursuing math and science.

Augusta Teller died on June 4, 2000, at age 91 from lung disease.