Wanda Szmielew née Montlak (5 April 1918 – 27 August 1976)[1] was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups.
In the same year she entered the University of Warsaw, where she studied logic under Adolf Lindenbaum, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Alfred Tarski.
Her research at this time included work on the axiom of choice, but it was interrupted by the 1939 Invasion of Poland.
[1] Szmielew became a surveyor during World War II, during which time she continued her research on her own, developing a decision procedure based on quantifier elimination for the theory of abelian groups.
[1][2] In 1949 and 1950, Szmielew visited the University of California, Berkeley, where Tarski had found a permanent position after being exiled from Poland for the war.