"Even by 1800s standards, Ada Byron Lovelace had an unusual upbringing. Her narcissistic mother worked hard at cultivating her own role as martyred ex-wife of bad-boy poet Lord Byron and had Ada tutored at home by some of the brightest minds. Ada developed a hunger for mental puzzles, mathematical conundrums, and scientific discovery that kept pace with the breathtaking advances of the industrial and social revolutions taking place in Europe. At seventeen,...

Meet Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who worked at NASA in the early 1950s until retiring in 1986. Katherine's unparalleled calculations (done by hand) helped plan the trajectories for NASA's Mercury and Apollo missions (including the Apollo 11 moon landing). She is said to be one of the greatest American minds of all time.