Irene Antonia Gargantini (born 1934) is an Italian-Canadian retired computer scientist and numerical analyst, known for her research on root-finding algorithms[A][B] and quadtrees and octrees,[C][D] and in particular for introducing the use of hash tables in place of pointer-based structures for representing quadtrees and octrees.
[1] In her retirement as a professor emerita at the University of Western Ontario, she has also become a self-published novelist under the pseudonym René Natan.
With the encouragement of her parents, she studied physics at the University of Milan, and after earning a doctorate there, she became a researcher at the university, where her work involved the calculation of electron trajectories in synchrotrons, using a computer from the Computer Research Corporation.
There, her interests began shifting to the newly established field of numerical analysis.
[3] After seeing an announcement in the Communications of the ACM for a new computer science program at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, headed by John Hart (whose research she had used at IBM), she took a faculty position in the program, beginning in 1968.