Margaret Smagorinsky

Margaret Smagorinsky (23 December 1915 – 14 November 2011) was an American statistician, computer programmer, and pioneering weather technologist. She was the first female statistician hired by the US Weather Bureau.

Early life

Smagorinsky was born in Brooklyn, New York as the second of four daughters of Anne and George Knoepfel. She attended Bay Ridge High School in Brooklyn.

Smagorinsky loved learning from an early age and was the first member of her family to attend college when she attended Brooklyn College. She graduated at age 19 with a degree in mathematics, and taught school in a one-room schoolhouse in Ashland, N.Y. for four years. In 1942, the Washington Post-Herald wrote about her as the first female professional statistician in the department. she met Joseph Smagorinsky in a graduate statistics course. He was 8 years her junior, and they married on May 29, 1948. In April 1950, a group of meteorologists at New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study successfully produced the first weather forecast using the ENIAC and numerical prediction techniques. Smagorinsky is cited as a programmer of computers for 5-day weather forecast models created by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some Legends and Lore of Princeton University: Historical Sketches (Little Books Series)