Florence Newman Trefethen

Florence Marion Newman Trefethen (1921–2012) was an American codebreaker, historian of operations research, poet, and English professor.

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 was for many years 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]