Margot Lee Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly is an American journalist and author whose Hidden Figures recovered the stories of the Black female mathematicians whose calculations were essential to NASA's early space program.

Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where her father worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center, and knew many of the women she would eventually write about as family friends and community members. Hidden Figures, published in 2016, tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and their colleagues — African American women mathematicians known as “human computers” who performed essential calculations for NASA during the space race. The book was published alongside the Academy Award-nominated film adaptation.

Hidden Figures works as both history and narrative. Shetterly is meticulous about context — she situates her subjects within the specific conditions of Jim Crow Virginia, the desegregation of the federal workforce, and the culture of Langley’s computing pools — and the result is a book that understands how these women navigated extraordinary professional achievement within systems designed to exclude them. Katherine Johnson’s contribution to John Glenn’s orbital flight, in particular, is rendered with the drama it deserves.

Some readers find that the book’s scope — covering multiple decades and many individuals — spreads the narrative somewhat thinly and that certain characters receive insufficient space to come fully alive on the page. The film necessarily simplified, but it also focused in ways that gave individual figures more screen time than the book’s comprehensive approach allows. These are minor criticisms of a book that fills a genuine gap in American scientific and racial history. Shetterly tells a story that should have been told long ago, and she tells it with rigor and care.