Hidden Figures

The Prologue sets the scene for how Shetterly came to write this book. She describes a visit home for Christmas 2010, during which she and her husband listened to stories from her father and several women who were members of her parents’ church. For 40 years, her father worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and he described the women, both Black and white, who were employed there as mathematicians. They helped America put the first men on the Moon. Shetterly grew up among them, but as an adult now realized how groundbreaking they were and decided to write a book about them.

Shetterly begins the tale in 1943, in the middle of World War II, when the demand for military aircraft in the United States skyrocketed. The industry was the “largest industry in the world, the most productive, the most sophisticated, outproducing the Germans by more than three times and the Japanese by nearly five. The facts were clear to all belligerents: the final conquest would come from the sky” (3). Thus, the demand for employees, from engineers to factory workers, was intense.

New designs were constantly being pushed to get a leg up on the enemy, and the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory was where they were tested and reworked.