Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Hidden Figures is Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 nonfiction book about the Black women who worked as mathematicians and "human computers" for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its successor, NASA. Shetterly began the project in 2010 and follows Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden from the 1930s through the 1960s, showing how segregation and gender discrimination kept them behind the scenes even as their calculations supported American aeronautics and spaceflight. The narrative sets their careers against the wider history of the segregated workplace at Langley, the civil rights movement, and the Space Race, and shows how the women's growing recognition moved them into engineering and senior technical roles. The book reached number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film.