Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

help out with whatever time they could
squeeze in around what they owed to
Henry Pearson. He got them to do
“computing runs” for him—which meant
getting Katherine to do computing runs
for them. The group took on the
additional tasks with zeal, because space
looked like “a hell of a lot of fun.” They
turned their desks into a trigonometric
war room, poring over equations,
scrawling ideas on blackboards,
evaluating their work, erasing it, starting
over.
There was virtually no aspect of
twentieth-century defense technology that
had not been touched by the hands and
minds of female mathematicians. Like
Katherine and her colleagues at Langley,
women at the Aberdeen Proving Ground
in Maryland spent thousands upon