Margot Lee Shetterly William Collins £16.99 HB

NASA’s ‘giant leap for mankind’ isn’t just an apt comment on the incredible technical and scientific goal of reaching the Moon: as this book makes clear, it’s also relevant to that organisation’s contribution to improving social equality in the US.

Hidden Figures tells the never before documented tale of how NASA (and its predecessor NACA) employed teams of female African American mathematicians as human ‘computers’ from the 1940s onwards. What is even more surprising is that these women were recruited to work alongside white male engineers and scientists in Langley, a town in West Virginia, which was one of the most racially segregated states in the country. In this part of the US racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws confined every aspect of the lives of African American people.

So, how did this situation come about? Shetterly tells the tale of these remarkable women (she concentrates on four in this book but estimates there were more than 50 altogether) and how they obtained college degrees in maths before working as teachers. During the Second World War scientists and mathematicians were in short supply, and NACA realised that the African American women right on its doorstep were more than qualified to do the calculations required for developing the new generations of planes and later, once the Space Race took off, spacecraft.

Initially the workplace at NACA was segregated but soon the barriers started to fall. For example Shetterly details the battle fought and won by the women to sit where they wanted in the canteen. As with the earlier generation of female ‘computers’ hired at Harvard, these women were not just button-pushers, they contributed fully to the demanding and rigorous technical work. The book excels when it details the minutiae of these women’s lives in the wider social context both before and after they seized the opportunity to work at NACA/ NASA. More discussion of the technical aspects of the women’s work would have been interesting, but overall this is a fascinating and important document about a hitherto unknown impact of NASA’s endeavours. A film adaptation of the book, also called Hidden Figures, will be in UK cinemas from 24 February. Katherine Johnson, NASA employee, mathematician and physicist, in 1966

PIPPA GOLDSCHMIDT and science writer

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