The Cherokee Mathematician Who Helped Design America’s Space Age – While Much Of Her Work Remained Secret

The history of women in mathematics and the sciences is, in significant part, a history of work that was done and not credited.

This is documented extensively across many fields and many periods.

Ada Lovelace wrote algorithms for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1840s and was not widely recognized for decades.

Lise Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission and was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded to Otto Hahn for that discovery.

The women human computers at Harvard’s observatory catalogued the stars without receiving formal academic credit.

The Black women mathematicians at NASA Langley calculated the trajectories that sent American astronauts into space while being officially classified as “computers” rather than engineers.