Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson were mathematicians who worked in NASA’s space programs as “human computers”. Facing many difficulties as pioneers in their field, their story was told in the film Hidden Figures.

Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked for NASA. Considered a child prodigy, she graduated in Math and was a teacher until she started working in the computing section of the agency. She calculated the trajectories that made many space missions possible, including the 1969 Moon landing.

Katherine calculated trajectories for historic missions, like Alan Shepard’s, the first American in space, and John Glenn’s, the first American to orbit the Earth. In 2015, then president Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

A former Math teacher, Dorothy Vaughan was one of the first black women to work as a mathematician at NASA. Talented and trusted by the agency’s engineers, she became NASA’s first black manager and helped many other women to find jobs in the agency, including Katherine Johnson.

She worked on the program that put the first American satellites into space and became an expert in NASA’s programming language. She was also part of other important missions, like John Glenn’s, the first American to orbit Earth.

Mary Jackson was the first black female engineer at NASA. With a degree in Math, she left her job as a teacher to work at the agency. After two years as a mathematician, she was invited to work for an engineer, who encouraged her to enter a training program to become an engineer too.

She entered the training program and later earned a promotion. As an aeronautical engineer, she helped develop NASA’s space program. Before she retired, she became a manager and helped other women find jobs in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields at NASA.