What is perfectly clear is that the women who were hired were crack mathematicians, either already holding master’s degrees or destined to gain one. The author never fully explains what machine they were using, but it was likely more advanced than the comptometer. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, desegregating the defense industry and paving the way for Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and others to begin work in 1943. The first female computing pool, begun in the mid-1930s, had caused an uproar the men in the lab couldn’t believe a female mind could process the rigorous math and work the expensive calculating machine. Shetterly’s father, a 40-year veteran of what became Langley Research Center, used to tell her the stories of the black female “computers” who were hired in 1943 to work in the computing pool. An inside look at the World War II–era black female mathematicians who assisted greatly in the United States’ aeronautics industry.
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