American mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Jackson died #OTD in 2005.
In 1951 she started working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), where she was a member of its West Area Computing unit and Jackson’s supervisor was Dorothy Vaughan. Despite early promotions, she was denied management-level positions, and in 1979 she left engineering and took a demotion to become manager of the women’s program at NASA.