Dorothy Vaughan

Early life and teaching

Dorothy Vaughan was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 20 September 1910, and her family later moved to Morgantown, West Virginia. On a full-tuition scholarship she studied at Wilberforce University, a historically Black college in Ohio, and earned a mathematics degree in 1929 at age 19. She married Howard Vaughan Jr. in 1932 and raised six children. She then taught mathematics at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia.

West Area Computing

During World War II a labour shortage led the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to hire Black mathematicians at its Langley laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Vaughan was hired as a "computer" in December 1943. Under Virginia's Jim Crow laws, the Black women computers worked apart from their white colleagues in Langley's West Area, ate in separate dining areas and used designated restrooms; the group became known as the West Computers. The Smithsonian notes that they faced stiffer hiring requirements and lower pay than white computers.

In 1949 Vaughan was promoted to lead the unit, becoming the NACA's first Black supervisor. She pressed for promotions and raises for the women she supervised, and for computers generally, regardless of race. With Vera Huckel and Sara Bullock she compiled a handbook of algebraic methods for the group's calculating machines.

Programming at NASA

On 5 May 1958, a memo from NACA associate director Floyd L. Thompson formally disbanded the West Area Computing unit and reassigned its members to integrated branches. That year the NACA became NASA, and Vaughan joined the new Analysis and Computation Division, which was integrated by race and gender, working in its Numerical Techniques Branch.

As electronic computers replaced human computation, she taught herself the FORTRAN programming language and taught it to colleagues, becoming an expert programmer. She contributed to the Scout launch vehicle programme. She sought further management posts at Langley but never received one.

Later life and legacy

Vaughan retired in 1971 after a 28-year career. Asked about working under segregation and gender barriers, she said, as NASA records it, "I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured." She died in Hampton, Virginia, on 10 November 2008, at 98.

Her story reached a wide audience through the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which also portrayed her West Computing colleagues Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson.