Gladys Garabedian

On June 13, 2024, Gladys Rappaport Garabedian died of natural causes at age 99.5. She was one of the early and leading computer programmers in the United States.

Despite her bicoastal career, she was a true New Yorker. She was born in the Bronx on October 18, 1924. In 1941, she graduated from Walton High School in the Bronx. In 1945, she graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College with a degree in statistics.



During World War II, Columbia University's Statistical Research Group had been assisting the war effort through solving mathematical and statistical problems. Working with famed statistician Al Bowker, Gladys was a junior statistician at the SRG. In 1945, the SRG computers were actually young women with Merchant calculators who worked out their calculations by following the steps of a program written Gladys. Gladys supervised and checked their work. As a young woman, Columbia University recognized Gladys for her mathematical contributions to the WWII. In 1946, she received a commendation from Columbia University for her mathematical contributions to the United States' WWII efforts.

In 1947, Gladys earned a master's degree in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley and continued working with Al Bowker on the cutting edge of applied statistics at Stanford University. While in California, Gladys met and married Paul Garabedian, a leading mathematician. In the 1950s, in two weeks, she developed a program to solve the bow-wave problem based on mathematical formulae developed by Paul. Their work influenced the design of a transonic airfoil that is now used in commercial airplanes and an exemplar of applied mathematics. Although Paul's greatest contributions were in computational calculations, he never wrote a computer program himself. Gladys wrote the first computer program to prove his mathematical theories.

After WWII, Gladys and Paul traveled throughout Europe while Paul was on assignment from the United States to search for mathematical geniuses to emigrate to the United States. In the 1950s, Gladys was given a mathematical equation to solve to support Edward Teller's research at the United States' second nuclear weapons laboratory in Livermore, California. She also briefly worked for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation before joining IBM in 1959.

In 1959, she was invited to work for IBM in New York. She had an illustrious career with IBM, working on an eclectic team of 10 employees to develop FORTRAN. FORTRAN was the programming language of choice in 1950s-1970s. She lead the development and coding of Phase 1 if US FORTRAN. Gladys was affectionately known as "Miss FORTRAN."



In 1960, she developed the computer program that successfully predicted the outcome of the Kennedy-Nixon election. In 1977, she moved to Palo Alto with IBM to work at the Santa Teresa labs in San Jose. She later moved to Sunnyvale, California and continued working with IBM until she retired in 1990. During concerns about possible Y2K computer glitches, IBM tried to lure Gladys back into service to identify possible problems in code development. Gladys declined, confident that Y2K would be a nonevent.

Gladys was a flaming red head and very fashionable despite being only five feet tall. She never lost her thick Brooklyn accent. She was a life-long New York Times subscriber. Gladys was a patron of the arts and a season ticket holder for the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Symphony, and the chamber music series Music at Menlo. Gladys belonged to multiple art museums in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. She was a very generous donor to a wide variety of progressive causes (SPL, ACLU, Planned Parenthood). An avid reader for her entire life, in retirement she added more hobbies, learning to make jewelry and becoming an accomplished calligrapher. For her last two decades, she lived in the Moldaw Residences in Palo Alto, California.



She divorced Paul Garabedian, in 1963, in Ciudad Jaurez, Chihuahua, Mexico and did not remarry. She is survived by her nieces, Betty Lewis (Paul Zafer) and Emily Lewis Mantell (Matthew Mantell, deceased), nephew David Lewis (Linda Cruciani), great-niece Sonia Mantell and great-nephew Evan Lewis.