Dorothy Johnson Vaughan

Mathematician

• Born: September 20, 1910
• Place of Birth: Kansas City, Missouri
• Died: November 10, 2008
• Place of Death: Hampton, Virginia

Significance: The life of Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was immortalized in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book of the same name. Vaughan was one of the few African American women who were part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) West Area Computing unit that contributed their mathematical skills to make space flight possible in the 1950s and 1960s. Vaughan, in particular, was instrumental in providing the computer coding that made the Scout Launch Vehicle Program possible.

Background

Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was born on September 20, 1910, to Leonard and Anne Johnson of Kansas City, Missouri. When she was seven years old, her family relocated to Morgantown, West Virginia, where Vaughan eventually attended Beechurst High School. After graduation, Vaughan enrolled at Ohio’s Wilberforce University, where she received a full scholarship to study mathematics and French. Although Vaughan’s professors encouraged her to continue her education at Howard University in Washington, DC, after she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1929, she declined. Instead, she got married and took a job as a math teacher in Farmville, Virginia’s Robert Russa Moton High School. Impacted by the onset of the Great Depression, Vaughan juggled teaching and raising her growing family for more than a decade.

With the United States actively engaged in World War II beginning in 1941, the government agencies overseeing the country’s defense had discontinued their racial and ethnic discrimination laws and had begun hiring African American women to process aeronautical research data. In 1943, Vaughan and her husband Howard moved to Newport News, Virginia, where she took a job that she assumed would be temporary. Vaughan was assigned to the segregated West Area Computing unit of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later renamed Langley Research Center) at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). She would remain at the organization until her retirement in 1971.

Working on the Ground So Others Could Fly

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued his executive order to lift discrimination policies two years earlier, in 1943, NACA still required its Black employees to work, dine, and use separate restroom facilities from their White colleagues. Vaughan initially worked with her African American counterparts, operating under White section leaders. In 1949, however, Vaughan received a promotion to lead the West Area Computing unit, making her the first Black supervisor at the organization. In her new position, Vaughan worked on high-profile projects, such as performing the mathematical computations needed to conduct experiments on the drag and lift of aircraft and the creation of a handbook outlining the algebraic methods necessary to program calculating machines. Vaughan led her department as they worked long shifts, often around the clock, to provide the calculations needed to test supersonic flight research.

In 1958 NACA was absorbed by NASA under the latter’s name, which established itself as a desegregated organization. In 1961, Vaughan joined the Numerical Techniques Division, where she shifted her focus from slide rules and graph paper to learning computer programming. With the onset of computing technology, Vaughan made sure that she and her fellow “human computers” were indispensable by teaching herself and others the FORTRAN programming language. Eventually, Vaughan was transferred to the Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), where she remained for the rest of her career. One aspect of her duties with ACD was to replicate the mathematical computations carried out by computers because the NASA scientists were distrustful of the new technology.

Within the ACD, Vaughan worked on the Scout (Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test) Launch Vehicle Program. It was a four-stage rocket system built to launch satellites into orbit. With contributions from programmers like Vaughan, the launch vehicle became one of NASA’s most successful, and after thirty years, the project was transferred to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

During the last ten years of Vaughan’s career at NASA, she worked with lauded mathematicians Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson. One of their first tasks together was to ensure astronaut John Glenn’s successful orbit around Earth aboard the Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. Vaughan retired from NASA in 1971 to live out a quiet life in Hampton, Virginia. She died at the age of ninety-eight on November 10, 2008, just a week after Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, was elected.

Impact

Despite Vaughan’s considerable achievements, she never received a promotion to senior-level leadership at NASA. In fact, throughout her career, Vaughan was often referred to by male colleagues as the “best girl” for the job. In 2016, Vaughn’s life and work were immortalized with the release of the popular film Hidden Figures, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book by the same name, detailing a time when Vaughan and her colleagues contributed to the United States’ part in the Space Race—the Cold War space exploration competition between the US and the Soviet Union that began in the 1950s. The film inspired the US State Department to launch an exchange program called #HiddenNoMore, which brought fifty women from around the globe to the United States to visit organizations and universities that promoted STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education.

In 2024, NASA named a building at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in honor of Vaughan and all the other women who worked on the Apollo program. The building’s official name was the Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo.

Personal Life

Dorothy Johnson married Howard Vaughan in 1932. Together they had six children, ten grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren. Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was an active choir member and missionary in the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, as well as a proud member of the African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

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“Dorothy Johnson Vaughan.” Biography, 15 Sept. 2020, www.biography.com/scientist/dorothy-johnson-vaughan. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Loggins, Sumer. “NASA Johnson Dedicates Dorothy Vaughan Center to Women of Apollo.” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2 Aug. 2024, www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/nasa-johnson-dedicates-dorothy-vaughan-center-to-women-of-apollo/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

McFadden, Christopher. “Dorothy Vaughan: NASA’s ‘Human Computer’ and American Hero.” Interesting Engineering, 20 Sept. 2021, interestingengineering.com/dorothy-vaughan-nasas-human-computer-and-american-hero. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Nielsen, Euell A. “Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (1910–2008).” BlackPast, 7 Jan. 2017, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/vaughan-dorothy-johnson-1910-2008/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Ryerson, Jade. “Places of Hidden Figures: Black Women Mathematicians in Aeronautics and the Space Race.” National Park Service, 6 May 2021, www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Shetterly, Margot Lee. “Dorothy Vaughan Biography.” NASA, 5 Aug. 2024, www.nasa.gov/content/dorothy-vaughan-biography. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.