An account of the previously unheralded but pivotal contributions of NASA's African-American women mathematicians to America's space program describes how they were segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws in spite of their groundbreaking successes.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these "colored computers," as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's...

Discusses how in the 1950s, black women made critical contributions to NASA by performing calculations that made it possible for the nation's astronauts to fly into space and return safely to Earth.-- Edwards and Harris discuss the critical contributions black women made to NASA in the 1950s. They performed by hand the calculations that made it possible for the nation's astronauts to fly into space and return safely to Earth. Their efforts made it...