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Dorothy Vaughan led the West Area Computers, a segregated group of Black women mathematicians at NACA, NASA's predecessor, and in 1949 became its first Black supervisor. When electronic computers arrived, she taught herself and her staff the programming language FORTRAN.

Dorothy Vaughan

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The story behind the card

Vaughan was a mathematics teacher when she joined the Langley laboratory in Virginia in 1943, during the Second World War, as a 'human computer', someone who did engineers' calculations by hand. Under Virginia's segregation laws, the Black women of West Area Computing worked, ate and used bathrooms apart from their white colleagues. In 1949 she became acting head of the unit, the first Black supervisor at NACA. When NASA replaced NACA in 1958, the segregated unit was abolished and she joined the new Analysis and Computation Division, where she became an expert FORTRAN programmer and worked on the Scout rocket, which launched small satellites. She retired in 1971. Her story reached a wide audience through Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures and the film based on it.

Türkçe oku
Dorothy Vaughan, NASA'nın öncülü NACA'da ırk ayrımı yüzünden ayrı çalıştırılan Siyah kadın matematikçilerin ekibi West Area Computers'ı yönetti ve 1949'da kurumun ilk Siyah amiri oldu. Elektronik bilgisayarlar gelince FORTRAN programlama dilini hem kendisi öğrendi hem ekibine öğretti.

Vaughan, İkinci Dünya Savaşı sırasında, 1943'te Virginia'daki Langley laboratuvarına bir “insan bilgisayar” olarak girdiğinde matematik öğretmeniydi; insan bilgisayarlar mühendislerin hesaplarını elle yapan çalışanlardı. Virginia'daki ırk ayrımı yasaları yüzünden West Area Computing biriminin Siyah kadınları beyaz meslektaşlarından ayrı çalışıyor, ayrı yemek yiyor, ayrı tuvalet kullanıyordu. Vaughan 1949'da birimin başına vekâleten getirildi ve NACA'nın ilk Siyah amiri oldu. 1958'de NACA'nın yerini NASA alınca ayrı birim kaldırıldı. Vaughan yeni kurulan Analiz ve Hesaplama Bölümü'ne geçti, usta bir FORTRAN programcısı oldu ve küçük uyduları yörüngeye taşıyan Scout roketi üzerinde çalıştı. 1971'de emekli oldu. Hikâyesi, Margot Lee Shetterly'nin 2016'da yayımlanan Gizli Sayılar (Hidden Figures) kitabı ve ondan uyarlanan filmle geniş kitlelere ulaştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Dorothy Vaughan
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