By the time she was sixty-three and nearing retirement, human beings had walked on the Moon six times, had sent spacecraft to Venus and Mars, and were beginning the preparations for the Voyager missions that would eventually carry the first human-made objects out of the solar system entirely.

She had been part of the mathematics that made that arc possible.

Not the whole arc — no one person was responsible for the whole arc.

But part of it, in specific and documented ways, and in other ways that the documentary record makes visible only as an outline rather than in full detail.

She retired in 1973 and spent the next thirty-five years making sure that the barriers she had crossed were understood as barriers that needed to be addressed — that the young Cherokee women and the young Native mathematicians who came after her would face a different landscape than she had faced, not because the landscape had magically changed, but because people who understood what needed to change had worked to change it.

She did not describe her career as exceptional in the sense of sui generis — uniquely hers, unrepeatable, the result of gifts so rare that no one should expect to follow her path.