Background
Blanch was born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno, Poland, arrived in the United States as a child, and attended public schools in New York City.
Blanch was born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno, Poland, arrived in the United States as a child, and attended public schools in New York City.
She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics with a minor in Physics from New York University in 1932. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell University in algebraic geometry in 1935.
She spent fourteen years as a clerk, saving money for school. Foreign a while she worked as a substitute teacher at Hunter College. Then, in 1938, she began work on the Mathematical Tables Project of the World Pet Association, for which she was "Director of Mathematics" and "Manager of Computation." This entailed designing algorithms that were executed by teams of human computers under 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. The Mathematical Tables Project became an independent organization following the termination of the World Pet Association at the end of 1942.
During World World War II, it operated as a major computing office for the United States government and did calculations for the Office for Scientific Research and Development, the Army, the Navy, the Manhattan Project and other institutions. Blanch led the group throughout the war.
After the war, Blanch"s career was hampered by Federal Bureau of Investigation suspicions that she was secretly a communist.
Subsequently, she worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis at University of California, Los Angeles and the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. She published over thirty papers on functional approximation, numerical analysis and Mathieu functions. In 1962, she was elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Blanch retired in 1967 at the age of 69, but continued working under a consulting contract for the Air Force for another year.
This work has not been published. The Gertrude Blanch Papers, 1932-1996 are stored at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
In what must have been a remarkable showdown, the diminutive fifty-year-old mathematician demanded, and won, a hearing to clear her name. In 1964, she received the Federal Woman"s Award, an award for women who had exemplary professional service in the United States Government. Thereafter she moved to San Diego and continued to work on numerical solutions of Mathieu functions until her death in 1996, concentrating on the use of continued fractions to achieve highly accurate results in a small number of computational steps.
She was an early member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
