Explores the previously uncelebrated but pivotal contributions of NASA's African American women mathematicians to America's space program, describing how Jim Crow laws segregated them despite their groundbreaking successes.

Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...

In 2015, at the age of 97, President Barack Obama awarded Katherine Johnson, whose life inspired the movie "Hidden Figures", the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom--the nation's highest civilian honor--for her pioneering work as a mathematician on NASA's first flights into space. In this memoir, she shares her personal journey from child prodigy in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia to NASA human computer. In her life after retirement,...

A stunning and intimate biography of Margaret Hamilton, the computer engineer who helped Apollo 11 and mankind get from the Earth to the moon. First-hand accounts, exclusive interviews with the legendary Margaret Hamilton, and detailed science populate the pages of this remarkable biography. In 1969, mankind successfully left our atmosphere and landed on the moon. It took countless hours of calculations, training, wonder, and sacrifice from all of...