In a significant ceremony held at the U.S. Capitol, the families of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden were presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress' highest honor. The event also paid tribute to all the women who served as mathematicians, engineers, and 'human computers' in the U.S. space program from the 1930s to the 1970s.
These remarkable women, whose contributions were pivotal but often overlooked, were instrumental in the success of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – the precursor to NASA. Hired to perform complex calculations for space missions, the Black women formed a segregated unit of female mathematicians at what is now NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia.
