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Meet the real women behind Hidden Figures.

In the early days of the Space Race, Dorothy Vaughan headed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA) West Area Computing unit. It was an important but segregated unit of mostly female mathematicians doing aerospace calculations by hand. When NACA became NASA in 1958, the Analysis and Computation Division desegregated and Vaughan became a sought-after expert on FORTRAN  – a programming language used on IBM mainframes.

Vaughan is one of the women whose work inspired the film Hidden Figures — a true story of three African American mathematicians who helped NASA launch the first Americans into space.

Feeling inspired? See how coding might figure into your life. Uncover more about Dorothy Vaughan →

NASA: 60 Years & Counting

We celebrate NASA’s first 60 years of achievement

#NACA Counting the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics