Gertrude Blanch (ca. 1897 - 1996) was a Polish-American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation.

Blanch was born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno , Poland, arrived in the United States as a child, and attended public schools in New York City. She spent fourteen years as a clerk, saving money for school. She received her B.S. in mathematics (minor in physics) from New York University in 1932. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell in algebraic geometry in 1935.

For a while she worked as a substitute teacher at Hunter College; then, in 1938, she began work on the Mathematical Tables Project of the WPA, for which she was technical director. This project later became the Computation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards.

During World War II, she worked for the Office for Scientific Research and Development, and she oversaw calculations for the Army, Navy, Manhattan Project and other institutions. Later, she worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA and the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. She was one of the founders of the ACM.

She published over thirty papers on functional approximation , numerical analysis and Mathieu functions. In 1962, she was elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Gertrude Blanch Papers, 1932-1996 are stored at the Charles Babbage Institute , University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Note: The year of birth is given as both 1897 and 1898.

References

• Grier, David Alan, "Gertrude Blanch of the Mathematical Tables Project", Annals of the History of Computing, 19.4 (1997), 18-27.
• Grier, David Alan, "The Math Tables Project of the Work Projects Administration: the reluctant start of the computing era", Annals of the History of Computing, 20 (1998), 33-50.

External links

• Gertrude Blanch
• Gertrude Blanch Papers, 1932-1996