Gertrude Blanch

Gertrude Blanch Born: 2 February 1897 in Kolno, Russian Empire (now Poland)Died: 1 January 1996) was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. She worked on the Mathematical Tables Project in New York. She was also the assistant director and leader of the Numerical Analysis at UCLA computing division.

Blanch was named Gittel Kaimowitz when she was born in Kolno, at the time the country was partitioned and Gittel Kaimowitz was born in a part which was in the Russian Empire. Her parents were Wolfe Kaimowitz and Dora Blanc emigrated to the United States— She was the youngest of their seven children. Blanch's father emigrated to the United States with the intention of having his wife and the younger children follow him in due course. In 1907, Dora with Gittel and one other daughter, joined Wolfe Kaimowitz in New York.

When Blanch arrived in the United States as a child, and attended public schools in New York City. In 1914 she graduated from Eastern District High School, however later that year her father died, so she decided to take a job to support her family. She spent fourteen years as a clerk, saving money for school. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics with a minor in Physics from New York University in 1932. The same year she changed her name from Kaimowitz to Blanch, which is her mother's Americanized name. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in algebraic geometry in 1935.

For a while she worked as a tutor in place of a colleague on leave at Hunter College; then, in 1938, she began work on the Mathematical Tables Project of the WPA, for which she was "Director of Mathematics" and "Manager of Computation." This entailed designing algorithms that were executed by teams of human computers und—er her direction. Many of these computers possessed only rudimentary mathematical skills, but the algorithms and error checking in the Mathematical Tables Project were sufficiently well designed that their output defined the standard for transcendental function solution for decades. This project later became the Computation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards.

...
Wikipedia