Hampton, Virginia is the home of NASA Langley Research Center. According to Margot Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which is the second longest book title of which I’m aware, losing out to Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Human Intelligence but Were Too Dumb to Ask: A Humorous Look at What Intelligence Is, How It Works & Who’s Got It, many of the people who worked in the space program at Langley retired in the area, thus providing her with easy access to them in her home town for research into her best-selling book.

Shetterly provided a rich picture of her background as the daughter of a NASA scientist who grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by mathematicians, aeronautical engineers, and physics professors. Just your typical childhood.

So it came as no surprise that she went into business after college and lived in Mexico for 11 years. Huh?

Fortunately for the rest of us, she found her way back to Virginia and realized that she had a great story to tell. So great that she sold the movie rights before she even finished writing the book, which, along with the usual dramatic license, resulted in diversions from the book in the movie, though Shetterly made it clear that she loved the movie and found it to be faithful to the crux of the book’s stories and themes.

As a follow-up to her work on the book, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, which is aimed at “recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s.”

More generally, she made the audience aware of the NASA Technical Reports Server, which contains decades of aerospace-related documents, including, hypothetically, numerous ones authored by one’s uncle.