She was computing futures that had not yet arrived.

The missions to other planets that the mathematics she contributed to would eventually enable — the Viking landers on Mars, the Voyager spacecraft passing through the outer solar system, the Cassini mission to Saturn, the ongoing Mars science programs — those missions did not exist when she was doing the work that would help make them possible.

She worked on the mathematics of a future that she helped make real.

There is something in that which goes beyond the biography and touches the nature of what technical work at the frontier actually is.