Gertrude Blanch
Gertrude K. Blanch (* as Gittel Kaimowitz on January 21 . Jul / 2. February 1897 greg. In Kolno , Russia ; † 1. January 1996 in San Diego ) was a Russian-American mathematician.
Blanch came to the United States from Poland in 1907 and went to high school in Brooklyn, graduating in 1914. She then worked for fourteen years as a clerk in a hat shop in New York to earn money for college. From 1928 she attended evening classes in mathematics (her employer paid her the study costs because she continued to work for him) at New York University , graduating summa cum laude in 1932, and in 1936 she received her doctorate from Cornell University under Virgil Snyder (Properties of the Veneroni transformation in S (4)). She was a part-time assistant teacher at Hunter College and then an accountant before becoming technical director of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York City in 1938, a major project to tabulate mathematical functions that was part of the New Deal's WPA job creation program that lasted until 1948. The bills were still carried out with punch card machines, human computers and desktop calculators, and Blanch was in charge of the 450 computers. Her staff included Ida Rhodes . During the Second World War, the project was in the service of the military. After the war she was at the Institute for Numerical Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and then at the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base . In 1967 she retired and lived in San Diego .
She published around 30 papers on numerical mathematics (approximation of functions, Mathieu functions, continued fractions, and others).
In 1962 she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1964 she received the Federal Women's Award from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
In 1921 she became a US citizen.
literature
- David Alan Grier: Gertrude Blanch of the Mathematical Tables Project, Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 19, 1997, pp. 18-27.
- David Alan Grier: The Math Tables Project of the Work Projects Administration: the reluctant start of the computing era, Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 20, 1998, pp. 33-50.
- David Grier: When computers were human, Princeton University Press 2005
- Gertrude Blanch, Ida Rhodes: Table Making at NBS, in: BK Scaife (Ed.), Studies in Numerical Analysis, Papers in Honor of Cornelius Lanczos, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, and Academic Press, New York, 1974, p. 1 –6.
- Eric Weiss: Ida Rhodes, Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 14, 1992, pp. 58-59.
Web links
- David Grier, Biographies of Women in Mathematics, Agnes Scott College
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Gertrude Blanch. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gertrude Blanch in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blanch, Gertrude |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Blanch, Gertrude K .; Kaimowitz, Gittel (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian-American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 2, 1897 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kolno , Russia |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 1, 1996 |
| Place of death | San Diego |