Evelyn Boyd Granville, a pioneering NASA “Hidden Figure” and Black mathematician, has passed away at the age of 99. Granville was one of the first two Black women in the United States to earn a Ph.D in mathematics, and her degree led to positions working on NASA’s early human spaceflight missions and a long career in education. She worked on NASA’s Project Vanguard satellite and first crewed Mercury launches, and later performed moon landing calculations as technical support for engineers on the Apollo program. After her time with the space agency, Granville became a mathematics professor at California State University, where she taught students how to teach mathematics, and also wrote textbooks on the matter. Granville retired to Washington, D.C. in 2010, and passed away peacefully at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland on June 27.
