WANTED: Female Mathematicians
Each of the engineers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory required
the support of a number of other workers: craftsmen to build the airplane
models, mechanics to maintain the test tunnels, and “number crunchers” to
process the data that was collected during the tests. For the engineers, a plane
was basically a complex physics experiment. Physics is the science of matter,
energy, and motion. Physics meant math, and math meant mathematicians. At
the Langley Laboratory, mathematicians meant women.
Female mathematicians had been on the job at Langley since 1935. And it
didn’t take long for the women to show that they were just as good or even better
at computing than many of the male engineers. But few of the women were
granted the title “mathematician,” which would have put them on equal footing
with some male employees. Instead, they were classified as “subprofessionals,”
a title that meant they could be paid less.
At Langley, the female mathematicians were called “computers.” They did
the computations to turn the results of the raw data gathered by the engineers
into a more useful form. Today we think of computers as machines, but in the
1940s, a computer was just someone whose job it was to do computations, a
flesh-and-blood woman who was very good with numbers.
In 1943, it was difficult for the Langley Laboratory to find as many qualified