Brian Zhao
Erin Malone
IXD History
26 September 2020
Annie Easley
Annie Easley is NASA’s first African American computer and rocket scientist. She was born in Birmingham of Alabama on April twenty-third, 1933. Although the Jim Crow Laws were enforced in Alabama and the opportunities for African Americans to receive education were very limited at the time, Easley still managed to finish her elementary, junior, and high school. In the year of 1950, Annie studied pharmacy major at Xavier University, but this did not help her in finding jobs. And in the next few years, Easley would meet the most significant turning point in her life.
Easley was one day reading a newspaper and she learned about the department, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). She then applied to the NACA as a mathematician and computer engineer, and her duty is to record the calculation results from the computer and do the more complicated math which could not be done by just the computer itself.
In October of 1958, NACA officially became NASA. Easley worked on many energy-related projects and the most well-known one is the Centaur Rocket project. In this Centaur Rocket project, she played a big role in coding a program that can automatically and precisely calculate the fuel mixture of the Centaur Rocket. Her contributions in this project set a very good base up for the future’s aviation and space exploration projects. As Easley continued to make progress in her career, she also didn’t forget to make self-improvement. She studied mathematics at Cleveland State University during all this time and she was forty-four years old when she earned her last degree.
The reason why Annie Easley could be important to interaction design is that her idea of creating a half-automatic calculating system was potentially impactful to automatic feedback control systems. People also believe that the Centaur Rockets would not be able to launch without her. Her ideas are definitely worth studying.
Citation
- “What launched Annie Easley?” My Girl Heroes, 30 Jan. 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrs6CL4ym4s&t=116s. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.
- “Five Fast Facts about Rocket Scientist Annie Easley.” Energy.Gov, 10 Mar. 2016, www.energy.gov/articles/five-fast-facts-about-rocket-scientist-annie-easley. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.
- “Annie Easley, Computer Scientist and Mathematician” Kindra Thomas, 3 Feb. 2020. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/annie-easley-computer-scientist-and-mathematician. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.
