Blanch, G. (Gertrude), 1897-

Gertrude Blanch was born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno, Poland, and emigrated to New York with her family in 1907. She received the B.S. in 1932 from New York University and the Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Cornell University in 1935. From 1938-1942, Blanch served as technical director of the Mathematical Tables Project, which in 1942 became part of the wartime Office for Scientific Research and Development. She later served in senior positions at the Institute for Numerical Analysis and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Throughout her career, Blanch published numerous papers and received a number of prestigious citations and awards.

From the description of Gertrude Blanch papers, 1932-1996. (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). WorldCat record id: 62439602

Gertrude Blanch, 1897-1996, mathematician, received the B.S. in mathematics with a physics minor from New York University (1932) and the Ph.D. (1935) in algebraic geometry from Cornell University.

Born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno, Poland, Blanch emigrated to New York with her family in 1907. After receiving her Ph.D., she taught at Hunter College from 1935-1936. Her doctoral dissertation, Properties of the Veneroni Transformation in S4, was published in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1936.

From 1938-1942, Blanch served as technical director of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York. The Mathematical Tables Project was funded by the Work Projects Administration. By 1941 it employed 450 human computers. In 1942 the project became part of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), and Blanch became a mathematician for the New York office of the Applied Math panel of the OSRD.

During the war, the Mathematical Tables Project created ballistics calculations for the Army, navigation tables for the Navy, and provided the fundamental calculations for the Manhattan Project. After the war the project was absorbed into the computation laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards. While still in New York, Blanch took an active interest in the newly-announced electronic computing machines, and was involved with the group that would later found the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 1948, Blanch became assistant to the director at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles, another branch of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory. In 1954 she was appointed senior mathematician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in which capacity she served until her retirement in 1967. While she was at Dayton, Blanch published half of her 30 papers, and received several citations and awards, including her election as Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Air Force Exceptional Service Award (both in 1963), and the Federal Woman’s Award in 1964.

Upon her retirement from the Air Force, Blanch was awarded a consulting contract by the Air Force through Ohio State University. When this contract was canceled in 1970 she moved back to California and worked on her second book, which was never published.

From the guide to the Gertrude Blanch papers, 1932-1996, (University of Minnesota Libraries. Charles Babbage Institute. [cbi])