The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam "numerical experiment": history and pedagogical perspectives

The pioneering Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) numerical experiment played a major role in the history of computer simulation because it introduced this concept for the first time. Moreover, it raised a puzzling question which was answered more than 10 years later. After an introduction to this problem, we briefly review its history and then suggest some simple numerical experiments, with the Matlab((c)) code provided, to study various aspects of the 'FPU' problem.