Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Johnson was born in Kansas City in 1910 and graduated in mathematics from Wilberforce University at nineteen. She turned down a chance of graduate study to help her family through the Depression and taught school in Farmville, Virginia, for fourteen years. In 1943, with the war on and men away, the aeronautics laboratory at Langley began hiring Black women with mathematics degrees to do calculations by hand. She took the job expecting it to be temporary.

The women worked in a separate building, the West Area Computing unit, with their own bathrooms and dining table. They checked wind tunnel data and worked out flight calculations, and were loaned out to engineers who needed them. In 1949 Vaughan was made head of the unit, the first Black supervisor in the organisation, though it took years to make the title permanent. She fought for promotions and pay rises for her staff and knew every woman\'s strengths.

When electronic computers arrived in the late 1950s she saw what was coming. She learned Fortran, taught it to her team, and made them useful to the new machines rather than replaced by them. When NASA was formed in 1958 the segregated unit was dissolved and she joined the Analysis and Computation Division, where she worked on the Scout rocket programme.

She retired in 1971 and died in 2008, before the book and film Hidden Figures made her name known. She was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019.