But the reading is still incomplete.

The category of aerospace engineer is still not as diverse as the pool of mathematically talented people in the United States — still not reaching into Native communities, into rural schools, into the populations that Mary Ross came from and that she spent her retirement trying to connect to the opportunities that mathematics could open.

She was trying to enlarge the category by the most direct means available to her: demonstrating, through her own career, that the category was already larger than the institutional assumptions had recognized.

The Technical Handbooks And What They Represent