Merkel wrote Fortran code for her PhD thesis. [1]

Afaik she approximated the Schrödinger equation to compute the rate of decay of molecules with up to 6 atoms.

This [2] is the last physics paper of her (from 1990). After the wall fell, her interests changed quite a bit... Only political papers from then on.

[1] http://www.file-upload.net/download-9106454/AM-Diss.pdf.html

[2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2Fqua.560380214

Have you seen the code written by physicists? Go look up the source code to CERN's ROOT package and browse it's change-log. Some of it quirks can be forgiven for it being incredibly old, but still...