Hidden Figures

Katherine Johnson: How can you be possibly ogling these white men?
Mary Jackson: It's equal rights. I have the right to see fine in every color
 Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women, known as "human computers", we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA alongside many of history's greatest minds specifically tasked with calculating the momentous launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, and guaranteeing his safe return. Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes.

DOROTHY VAUGHAN (nee JOHNSON)

 In an era when NASA is led by an African American man (Administrator Charles Bolden) and a woman (Deputy Administrator Dava Newman), when recent NASA Center Directors come from a variety of backgrounds, it's easy to overlook the people who paved the way for the agency's current robust and diverse workforce and leadership. Those who speak of NASA's pioneers rarely mention the name Dorothy Vaughan, but as the head of the NACA's segregated West Area Computing Unit, Vaughan was both a respected mathematician and NASA's first African-American manager.

 Mary Winston Jackson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and received her bachelor’s degree from Hampton Institute in Mathematics and Physical Science. After graduation from college, she was briefly a school teacher in Maryland, then began her long career with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), later the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
Jackson began her career with NACA as a computer – the title given to women mathematicians at the time. She specialized in analyzing data from wind tunnel experiments and from actual aircraft on the many flight experiments NACA conducted. As her career progressed, she began to recognize that many minorities and women were not advancing as fast as she thought they should and so she began analyzing the situation to see what was holding them back. Occasionally it was as simple as a lack of a couple of courses, the location of the individual, or the assignments given them. Jackson advised women on how to change their titles from “mathematician” to “engineer” and increase their promotion potential; advice she followed herself. She was the first woman to become an engineer then an aerospace engineer.
 Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is a physicist and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, her technical work at NASA spanned decades during which she calculated the trajectories, launch windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program and even early plans for the Mission to Mars. 10 out of 10