Dorothy Vaughan

American mathematician and computer programmer who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor NASA. In 1949 she was assigned acting head of the West Area Computers, becoming NACA's first Black supervisor and one of its few female supervisors, leading a group made up entirely of African-American women mathematicians. As electronic computers arrived in the early 1960s, she taught herself and her staff the FORTRAN programming language to prepare them for the transition. Her career and that of colleagues including Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson was told in the book and film Hidden Figures.