Dorothy Vaughan
The FORTRAN Supervisor
Teaching her whole section to program before the machines replaced them
Rating
87Impact score
Domains
FORTRANNumerical computingTeam leadership
Scouting report
NASA’s first Black supervisor, running the segregated West Area Computing unit. Seeing that the arriving IBM machines would make human computers obsolete, she taught herself FORTRAN and then taught her staff, moving the whole group into programming rather than out of work. That is a rarer kind of technical foresight than the usual sort.
Curator’s note
Saw the automation coming and retrained her entire team ahead of it.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Dorothy Vaughan by Unknown authorUnknown author, licensed Public domain.
Sources
- 01Dorothy Vaughan en.wikipedia.org
- 02NASA biography nasa.gov