American mathematician and engineer Mary Jackson
Credit: NASA Langley Research Center

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., will be named after the American mathematician and engineer Mary Jackson (1921-2005). Jackson was the first black female engineer at NASA. She championed the advancement of women and minorities in the fields of mathematics and engineering.

Jackson was born Mary Winston on April 9, 1921, in Hampton, Virginia. She received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physical science from the Hampton Institute in 1942. She then worked as a mathematics teacher and took on a variety of jobs before joining the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Langley Research Center in 1951. NACA was the agency that preceded NASA.

At Langley, Jackson was a member of the West Area Computing unit. This group of black women mathematicians included Katherine Goble Johnson and was headed by Dorothy Vaughan. At the West Area Computing unit, Jackson initially analyzed data collected from flight experiments. She was promoted to engineer in 1958. That year, she co-authored her first report on the behavior of air around objects in flight at supersonic (faster than sound) speeds. She went on to publish several more research reports on this topic.

Jackson achieved a high rank as a NASA engineer, but she was frustrated by the gender and racial prejudice that still restricted her advancement. In 1979, she ended her engineering career to take a position as Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager. In this role, she helped women advance at the Langley Research Center.

Jackson retired from NASA in 1985. She died on Feb. 11, 2005. The book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016), written by the American author Margot Lee Shetterly, chronicles Jackson’s life and career, as well as those of other members of the West Area Computing unit. American actress and musician Janelle Monáe portrayed Jackson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, based on Shetterly’s book.