Gertrude Blanch

Gertrude Blanch (February 2, 1897 – January 1, 1996) was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation.

[1] Wolfe Kaimowitz emigrated to the United States, and in 1907, Dora Blanc, ten-year-old Blanch, and one other daughter joined him in New York.

[4][5] After her mother died in 1927, Blanch started taking evening classes at Washington Square College, part of New York University.

[1] She graduated with summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a prestigious academic honor society.

[5] After writing her thesis titled "Properties of the Veneroni Transformation in S4", she received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in algebraic geometry in 1935.

[3][6] Blanch was unable to find a job in her area of study after she graduated with her PhD, due to the Great Depression.

[7] While the Planning Committee was in operation, it included women other than Blanch such as Ida Rhodes, Jenny Rosenthal, and Irene Stegun.

Using a mathematical model developed by Jerzy Neyman, the group helped evaluate strategies designed to bomb the Normandy beaches.

Ida Rhodes dedicated her 1965 talk "The Mighty Man-Computer Team" to Blanch, saying "She has always exemplified for me everything that is noble, true, and admirable in a human being.

"[14] In 1967, Gaetano Fichera wrote of "the critical sharpness of [Blanch's] mind, her sensitivity to the quantitative study of problems, her capacity to perceive the subtle barrier which separates a purely theoretical procedure from a method leading to effective evaluation and, above all her intransigeant scientific scrupulousness, all these many qualities make of her a very distinguished numerical analysis.

Ample witness of our affirmation is not only is not only the high acknowledgment accorded to her mathematical activity but especially the imposing mass of her work in the field of numerical analysis.