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Mary Jackson became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958. To qualify, she had to petition the City of Hampton, Virginia, for permission to attend evening classes held at a school for white students only.

Jackson joined the West Area Computing unit at NACA's Langley laboratory in 1951, as a 'human computer' doing calculations by hand. In 1953 she went to work for the engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, a wind tunnel that blasted models with air at almost twice the speed of sound, and he urged her to train as an engineer. The courses she needed were run by the University of Virginia at Hampton High School, which was for white students only, so she asked the city for permission and won it. She wrote or co-wrote 12 technical papers, many on the thin layer of air flowing next to an aircraft's surface. In 1979, having reached the most senior engineering title open to her, she took a demotion to run programmes helping women and minorities advance at NASA. NASA named its Washington headquarters after her in 2020.

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Christine Darden, a NASA engineer, wrote computer programs to predict sonic booms, the thunder-like bangs made by aircraft flying faster than sound. Her research showed that reshaping a plane's nose and wings could make them softer on the ground.

Darden, a mathematics graduate of Hampton Institute, joined NASA's Langley Research Center in 1967 as a 'human computer', doing calculations for engineers. She pressed her managers to move her into engineering, and in the 1970s they did. A sonic boom forms when the shock waves from an aircraft's nose, wings and tail merge into one sharp jolt that reaches the ground. Darden's programs modelled those waves and pointed to shapes that keep them from merging, so people below hear a softer thump. She earned a doctorate in engineering from George Washington University in 1983, led NASA's sonic boom team from 1989 and wrote more than 50 papers. NASA's X-59, which first flew on 28 October 2025, was built to test this idea. Her story is also told in Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures.

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Annie Easley joined NACA, NASA's forerunner, in 1955 as a 'human computer' doing calculations by hand, then became a programmer. Her code supported the Centaur rocket stage, which later sent probes such as Voyager and Cassini into space, and research on energy and batteries.

Easley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933. When she joined the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, she was one of only four Black employees among about 2,500. As machines took over the arithmetic, she learned the programming languages FORTRAN and SOAP. Centaur, a rocket stage that fires after the first stage is spent, was the first to burn liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen, and her programs supported its analyses. Her energy work included simulations that supported early battery research for hybrid vehicles. She finished a mathematics degree at Cleveland State University in 1977 while working full time. As an equal employment opportunity counsellor, she helped resolve discrimination complaints, and she encouraged girls and minority students to take up science. She retired in 1989.

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Evelyn Boyd Granville, one of the first Black American women to earn a PhD in mathematics, wrote computer programs at IBM that calculated orbits for Vanguard and Mercury, the early US satellite and crewed spaceflight projects. She later worked on the Apollo programme.

Granville grew up in Washington, D.C., studied mathematics and physics at Smith College and earned her doctorate at Yale in 1949. Among Black American women, only Euphemia Lofton Haynes, in 1943, had earned a mathematics PhD before her; Marjorie Lee Browne finished hers the same year. Top academic posts were closed to Black women, so she taught at Fisk University, then joined IBM in 1956. At its Vanguard Computing Center in Washington she turned the mathematics of orbits into computer programs, and she later worked on trajectory calculations for Apollo at North American Aviation. From 1967 she was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, co-wrote a textbook on mathematics for teachers and ran maths enrichment programmes for young children. She died in 2023, aged 99.

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Radia Perlman, an American engineer, invented the spanning-tree algorithm, which stops data from circling endlessly in computer networks that have duplicate connections. It keeps the spare links switched off and brings one back into use when a cable fails.

When a network has more than one path between two points, a message can loop round and round, copying itself until the network jams. Perlman solved this in the mid-1980s while working at Digital Equipment Corporation. Her method lets the switches that connect a network agree among themselves, with no central controller, on one loop-free set of routes shaped like a branching tree; the extra links wait on standby. If a link breaks, the switches recalculate and a standby link takes over. The IEEE, the body behind many networking standards, adopted the method as 802.1D in 1990, and it and its faster successors still keep office and campus networks running. Perlman even described the algorithm in a short poem, “Algorhyme”.

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In 2014 Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician at Stanford University, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. She won it for work on the geometry of curved surfaces and on the space of all the shapes such surfaces can take.

In her field, a Riemann surface can be pictured as a doughnut-like surface with one or more holes, and its moduli space as a map in which every point stands for one possible shape of that surface. Mirzakhani, born in Tehran in 1977, made her name with her 2004 Harvard doctorate. It worked out how the number of simple closed geodesics, loops on the surface that never cross themselves and are as short as possible, grows with their length, and used that to measure the size of moduli spaces. She joined Stanford in 2009 and worked by drawing on large sheets of paper, which her young daughter called “painting”. She was also the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. She died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40, and her birthday, 12 May, is now International Women in Mathematics Day.

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In 1988 Belgian-American mathematician Ingrid Daubechies published the wavelets now named after her: small wave-like patterns that split a signal into its broad outline and its fine detail. Wavelets like hers help compress images, clean up noisy data and store fingerprints.

Fourier analysis, the classic tool for signals, shows which frequencies a sound or picture contains but not where they occur. Wavelets can also show where a sudden change or sharp edge happens. Working at the Courant Institute in New York in 1986–87, Daubechies found wavelets that are exact, confined to a short stretch of the signal and quick to compute, which let wavelets move from theory into everyday digital processing. Related wavelets she co-designed are used in the JPEG 2000 image standard, and the FBI's fingerprint archive relies on wavelet compression. She has also used these methods to study paintings by Van Gogh and to support the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. In 2011 she became the first woman to lead the International Mathematical Union, and in 2023 the first woman to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

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In 2019 American mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, one of the top honours in mathematics. She was recognised for methods that link geometry with the equations of physics, especially for handling the points where those equations break down.

Many problems in geometry and physics look for the smoothest or lowest-energy shape, like a soap film stretched across a wire loop. Sometimes the energy piles up at a single point and the smooth shape pinches off there, a breakdown mathematicians call bubbling. In the early 1980s, partly with Jonathan Sacks, Uhlenbeck showed how to control it: away from a few points the shape stays well behaved, and the energy lost at those points gathers into small, sphere-like pieces that can be studied in their own right. Her results became basic tools in gauge theory, the mathematics behind the forces of particle physics. Born in Cleveland in 1942, she became a MacArthur Fellow in 1983 and received the US National Medal of Science in 2000. She also co-founded a programme at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to bring more women into mathematics.

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Filipino paediatrician Fe del Mundo opened the Philippines' first children's hospital in Quezon City in 1957, paying for it by selling her house and taking out a large loan. She also took child healthcare out to the villages, designing a bamboo incubator for places without electricity.

Born in Manila in 1911, del Mundo qualified as a doctor at the University of the Philippines in 1933 and trained further in children's medicine at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. She came home in 1941, just before the Japanese occupation, and cared for children held in the Santo Tomas internment camp, where she became known as “the Angel of Santo Tomas”. Her Children's Medical Center opened in 1957. She sent teams into the countryside to teach breastfeeding and child care, pressed for village midwives to be brought into the health service, and wrote a Textbook of Pediatrics long used in Philippine medical schools. In 1980 she became the first woman named a National Scientist of the Philippines. She died in 2011, aged 99.

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American cancer doctor Jane C. Wright tested chemotherapy drugs on tumour tissue grown in the laboratory and compared the results with how patients responded. Her work helped move chemotherapy from trial and error towards a more systematic science.

Born in New York in 1919, Wright joined her father, the surgeon Louis T. Wright, at Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation in 1949. Instead of relying on laboratory mice, they grew samples of patients' tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then checked whether the laboratory results matched what happened in the clinic. In 1951 she reported that the drug methotrexate could shrink some breast and skin cancers; it is still widely used. She also devised a way to deliver strong drugs through a catheter, a thin tube, to tumours deep in organs such as the liver and spleen, without surgery. In 1964 she was the only woman among the seven doctors who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1967 she became associate dean at New York Medical College. She died in 2013.

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In 1935 American chemist Percy Julian and his colleague Josef Pikl became the first to make the glaucoma drug physostigmine from simple chemicals. Julian later found ways to extract sterols, the raw material for many hormones, from soybeans on a factory scale, making drugs such as progesterone and cortisone far cheaper.

Physostigmine came from the Calabar bean of West Africa and was scarce. Julian's synthesis at DePauw University in Indiana also showed that a rival synthesis by the eminent British chemist Robert Robinson had gone wrong. Despite this, DePauw refused him a professorship because he was Black, and in 1936 he moved to industry as director of research at the Glidden paint company in Chicago. There, water once leaked into a tank of purified soybean oil and turned it into a solid mass. Julian recognised that it was rich in sterols, plant compounds with the same basic structure as human hormones, and turned the accident into a factory process. It made progesterone and later cortisone much cheaper. Julian held more than 130 patents, and in 1973 he became the first African-American chemist elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

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WonderBiography

American biologist Ernest Everett Just showed that an egg cell's surface changes rapidly at fertilisation and helps stop extra sperm from getting in. Working with sea urchins and other marine animals, he insisted that cells be studied in conditions as close to natural as possible.

Just taught at Howard University in Washington from 1907 until his death and spent some twenty summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where his careful handling of marine eggs made him a sought-after expert. He described what is now called the fast block to polyspermy, the rapid change that keeps a second sperm out of the egg. In 1915 he became the first person to receive the Spingarn Medal from the US civil rights organisation NAACP. Racism kept him out of posts at major American research universities, so from 1929 he worked more and more in Europe: at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and later Roscoff in France. His 1939 book The Biology of the Cell Surface argued that the cell's outer layer, not only the nucleus, drives development. He died in 1941.

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WonderBiography

American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon sorted about 350,000 stars at Harvard by the pattern of dark lines in their light. Her classes, O, B, A, F, G, K and M, running from the hottest stars to the coolest, are still the standard way to group stars.

Cannon was one of the “Harvard computers”, a team of women hired to study photographs of the night sky on glass plates, often for about 25 cents an hour. When starlight is spread into a spectrum, a band of colours, dark lines appear that are left by the elements in the star. Earlier schemes used many letters; Cannon reordered and simplified them into one clear sequence, and in 1925 Cecilia Payne used her data in work showing that the sequence follows temperature. Nearly deaf after an illness, Cannon worked at legendary speed, classifying up to three stars a minute, and her results filled the Henry Draper Catalogue, published between 1918 and 1924. In 1925 she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University.

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American chemist Gertrude Elion shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George Hitchings and James Black. Elion and Hitchings designed drugs by studying how diseased cells and germs differ from healthy ones, instead of relying on trial and error.

Elion joined the drug company Burroughs Wellcome in New York State in 1944 as Hitchings's assistant. Their team built molecules that resemble the natural building blocks of DNA closely enough to jam the machinery of cancer cells, microbes or immune cells. The work produced 6-mercaptopurine for childhood leukaemia, azathioprine to stop the body rejecting transplanted organs, allopurinol for gout and acyclovir for herpes infections, and researchers trained in her methods later developed AZT, the first drug widely used against AIDS. Elion never finished a doctorate: after years of evening study she was told she would have to give up her job to continue full time, and she chose to keep working. Harvard and many other universities later gave her honorary degrees.

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In 1823 the American fur trapper Hugh Glass survived a grizzly bear attack in what is now South Dakota and was left behind by two companions who believed he would die. He then made his way to Fort Kiowa, about 200 miles (320 km) away, a journey said to have taken some six weeks.

Glass was travelling with a fur-trading expedition organised by William Ashley when the bear attacked. Two men were left to stay with him until he died: John S. Fitzgerald and a young trapper usually identified as Jim Bridger, though some historians doubt that. They took his rifle and knife and reported him dead. Glass left no written account; the story first reached print in 1825 through other writers, and later retellings, including the 2015 film The Revenant, added details that cannot be checked. The attack, the abandonment and the long journey are well supported, while the self-set broken leg and some revenge scenes belong to the legend. Glass later tracked down both men but did not kill either, and he died in 1833 in a clash with Arikara warriors.

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In 1960–61, thirteen American women pilots, later known as the Mercury 13, passed the same first-phase medical tests that physician William Randolph Lovelace had helped design for NASA's first male astronauts. The private project was never an official NASA selection and was stopped before they could go further.

Lovelace began in 1960 with the record-setting pilot Jerrie Cobb, who passed all three phases of testing and ranked in the top 2% of candidates of either sex; she then helped him find the other women, and the aviator Jacqueline Cochran paid for much of the work. NASA, however, required its first astronauts to be military jet test pilots with a degree in engineering or the equivalent, and women could not train as military test pilots. In July 1962 Cobb and fellow pilot Jane Hart asked a congressional subcommittee to let the testing continue; astronaut John Glenn argued against it, and nothing changed. The name “Mercury 13” was coined in 1995. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, and in 2021 Wally Funk, one of the thirteen, finally flew to space at 82.

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Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, took up painting in her late seventies after arthritis made embroidery too painful. She had her first solo show in New York at 80 and kept painting into her 101st year, becoming one of America's best-loved folk artists.

Born in 1860 in upstate New York, Moses spent most of her life as a farm wife, raising children and making embroidery and other decorative work at home. When arthritis made needlework painful, her sister suggested painting instead. In 1938 the collector Louis Caldor saw her pictures in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York, bought them, supplied her with materials and promoted her work. Her first solo exhibition, “What a Farm Wife Painted”, opened at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York in October 1940. She went on to paint more than 1,500 canvases of farm life and the changing seasons, mostly from memory. She died in 1961, and in 1969 the US Post Office issued a stamp showing her painting “July Fourth”, which is in the White House collection.

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In 1772, at 72, Mary Delany began making botanically detailed flower collages from cut coloured paper. She described the technique as a 'new way of imitating flowers' and went on to create 985 works in the series she called Flora Delanica.

Delany, a widow in her seventies, belonged to the Duchess of Portland's circle of artists and naturalists, nicknamed 'the Hive', where she met botanists such as Joseph Banks. She is thought to have dissected each plant first, then layered tiny pieces of coloured paper on a black background to match the real specimen petal by petal. Admirers sent her flowers to copy. King George III and Queen Charlotte, who later gave her a house at Windsor and a pension, asked for rare plants to be sent to her while in bloom. She worked for about a decade, until her eyesight failed. The ten volumes are now in the British Museum, left to it by a relative, Lady Llanover.

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Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil, and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He sat on the pavement of Monroe Street by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories of plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral home. In 1939 the young white artist Charles Shannon began supplying him with poster paint, brushes and paper, and later kept hundreds of the drawings safe. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened 'Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor', a retrospective billed as the first ever for an artist born into slavery.

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Julia Child could barely cook when she married at 34. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at 37, and after one publisher rejected her manuscript, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' appeared in 1961, when she was 49.

Child wrote the book with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and the three spent nearly a decade testing and rewriting recipes for an American kitchen, aiming for exact, foolproof instructions rather than a chef's shorthand. Houghton Mifflin turned the manuscript down, judging it too much like an encyclopaedia; Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1961, and it became a bestseller. On 11 February 1963, WGBH in Boston launched The French Chef, built on the same patient, step-by-step teaching; the show ran nationally for a decade and made Child a household name.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first novel in 1932, at 65. Little House in the Big Woods opened the Little House series, based on her own pioneer family's life in the American Midwest, and she kept writing the books into her seventies.

Before the novels, Wilder spent more than a decade writing for the Missouri Ruralist, a farm paper, including a regular column called 'As a Farm Woman Thinks'. The series grew to eight novels, published between 1932 and 1943 and drawn from her family's life as settlers in the 1870s and 1880s; a ninth, The First Four Years, was found after her death and published in 1971. Her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane, edited the manuscripts closely, and historians still debate how much of the prose is Lane's. The books later inspired the television series Little House on the Prairie (1974–1983).

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Harry Bernstein published his first book, the memoir The Invisible Wall, in 2007, at the age of 96. He had begun it at 93, after the death of Ruby, his wife of 67 years.

Bernstein was born in 1910 in Stockport, a cotton-mill town near Manchester, and the memoir recalls a street split between Jewish and Christian families. It tells of his mother, Ada, struggling to feed six children, his father's drinking, the antisemitism around them and his sister Lily's forbidden romance with a Christian boy. The family emigrated to the United States in 1922, where Bernstein later worked as a script reader and magazine editor until retiring at 62. Three more memoirs followed: The Dream (2008), The Golden Willow (2009) and What Happened to Rose, published after his death in 2011 at 101.

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Toni Morrison published her first novel, 'The Bluest Eye', in 1970, at 39. She wrote it before dawn, while editing other people's books by day and raising two sons on her own. In 1993 she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Morrison later said the early-morning writing began out of necessity, since she had small children and no other free hours; she came to like watching the light change over coffee before the day took over. At the time she worked as an editor at Random House, where in 1967 she became the first Black woman senior editor in its fiction department. She championed Black writers there, including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, and edited Muhammad Ali's 1975 autobiography. She kept that job for nearly twenty years while writing her own novels in the hours before it began.

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Stephen King crumpled the opening pages of 'Carrie' into the bin. His wife Tabitha fished them out, read them, and told him to keep going. The hardback earned a $2,500 advance, then the paperback rights sold for $400,000.

As King tells it in his memoir 'On Writing' (2000), he was then teaching English at a high school in Maine and living with Tabitha and their children in a trailer, and he doubted he could write convincingly about a teenage girl. Tabitha's verdict, that he had something there, kept the book alive. Doubleday bought the hardback, and the news of the paperback sale reached King by phone on Mother's Day 1973. The money let him give up teaching and write full time. 'Carrie' came out in 1974, dedicated to Tabitha, and became his first published novel.

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