By the time she was twenty, Charles Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic and aviation had become a technology with visible civilizational significance.

By the time she was thirty-four and arrived at Lockheed, the aircraft being built in Burbank were military aircraft in a global war, and the technology was advancing faster than anyone could track.

By the time she was forty-six, she was working in Lockheed’s most advanced aerospace environment on problems that the aircraft of her childhood could not have addressed, using mathematics that the physics of her childhood would not have been equipped to describe.

By the time she was fifty, Sputnik had been launched, NASA had been created, and the mathematics she was working on had become directly connected to the project of putting human beings in space.