In 2008, it had the International Space Station, a fleet of Mars orbiters and surface vehicles, a network of Earth-observing satellites covering every point on the globe, and a private space industry that was beginning the development of capabilities that had previously been exclusively governmental.

She had been born into the former world and had lived into the latter one, and in the space between those two worlds — in the decades of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when the transformation was actually happening — she had been inside one of the organizations doing the work of transformation.

That is not a small thing to have been part of.

That is, in fact, one of the most consequential periods of human technological development that has ever occurred, and she was inside it, doing mathematics that the development required.