Florence Newman Trefethen

Florence Marion Newman was born in 1921, in Philadelphia.[1] She graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1943.[2]

She enlisted as a Naval officer during World War II, and served in the WAVES as a codebreaker. She was part of the Magic project, whose decryptions of Japanese communications led to the ambush and death of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.[1][3] During this service she met Merchant Marine and later mechanical engineer Lloyd M. Trefethen;[3] they married in 1944.[4]

After the war, she came to Girton College, Cambridge on an Ottilie Hancock Bye Fellowship. She earned a Master of Letters there in 1946.[1]

Trefethen worked for many years as a professor of English at Tufts University,[3] and served for 18 years as executive editor for the Council of East Asian Studies at Harvard University.[1]

She and her husband had had two children, quilter Gwyned Trefethen in 1953 and mathematician Lloyd N. Trefethen in 1955.[1][5] She died on March 1, 2012.[1]

With Joseph F. McCloskey, Trefethen edited the book Operations Research for Management (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954).[6] She wrote the first chapter of the book, an early history of the field of operations research.[7]

She is also the author of Writing a Poem (The Writer, 1970), on the process of writing poetry.[8]