Dorothy Vaughan
NACA's first Black supervisor, who taught her unit to program
At a glance
- Inventor
- Dorothy Vaughan
- Life
- 1910–2008
- Birthplace
- Kansas City, Missouri
- Country
- United States
- Region
- United States
- Era
- 1950–2000
- Fields
- Space & Aerospace, Technology & Computing
- Evidence
- Documented
- Records
- 1 in this archive
What they did
Vaughan led the segregated West Area Computing unit at Langley from 1949, then — seeing that electronic computers would end hand computation — taught herself and her staff FORTRAN and moved them into the new Analysis and Computation Division.
Historical context
West Area computers were Black women mathematicians assigned to a separate building, with separate dining and washroom facilities, doing the aeronautical calculation that made flight research possible.
The legacy
She converted a segregated pool of human computers into machine programmers, protecting careers that the transition would otherwise have erased.
The evidence
Langley Research Center personnel and West Area Computing records
Primary recordHidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians
Scholarship
Documentation strength
- 2
- Sources
- 1
- Primary
- 2
- Publishers
Calculated from the sources actually attached to this record — the closer a source sits to the original document, the more it counts. It is never asserted by hand.