The 2016 movie Hidden Figures tells the story of a team of black women mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race of the 1960s. One of these women was Katherine G. Johnson, who was responsible for calculating the trajectories of John Glenn’s historic orbit around Earth and other important space missions.

What few people know, however, is that Johnson was not the only black woman working at NASA at the time. Dorothy Vaughan was the head of the West Area Computers, a team of black women who were responsible for running the mathematic equations that Johnson and her …