Let me tell you about a woman whose brilliance helped launch America into the space age, even though history almost forgot her name. Dorothy Vaughan was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. She grew up loving math, and by 1929 she graduated from Wilbur Forrest University with a degree in mathematics at just the age of 19.

She became a math teacher, but during World War II, everything changed. In 1943, Dorothy took what she thought would be a temporary job at NACA, the agency that would later become NASA. She joined the West Area Computing Unit, a segregated group of black female mathematicians known as human computers.

Their job? Performing the complex calculations that engineers relied on to test aircraft and eventually send astronauts into space. Dorothy quickly stood out. In 1949, she became the first African-American supervisor at NACA and one of the very few women in leadership at all.

When electronic computers arrived in the 1960s, many feared their jobs would disappear, but not Dorothy. She taught herself the programming language Fortran and then taught it to her entire team, preparing them for the future of computing. Her work supported some of NASA’s most important early missions, and although she retired in 1971, her impact lived on, shaping the careers of women like Mary Jackson and Catherine Johnson, who also became NASA legends.

For decades, Dorothy’s contributions went unrecognized, but in 2016, the book and film Hidden Figures finally brought her story to the world. Dorothy Vaughan passed away in 2008 at the age of 98, but her legacy is powerful. She broke barriers, opened doors, and proved that brilliance knows no boundaries.

So, the next time you look up into space, think of her story, the story of Dorothy Vaughan, the mathematician who helped launch us into space.