Annie Easley
Annie Easley was an influential African American computer scientist and mathematician born on April 23, 1933, in Birmingham, Alabama. Raised during the Jim Crow era, Easley faced significant educational limitations but excelled academically, graduating as valedictorian from Holy Family High School. She initially attended Xavier University to study pharmacy but later transitioned to a career at NASA, where she made substantial contributions over a thirty-four-year span. Easley began her journey at NASA's Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, working as a human computer and eventually transitioning to computer programming, where she developed crucial algorithms for rocket systems. Notably, her work contributed to the Centaur upper-stage rocket, which played a vital role in numerous space missions, including the launch of the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn. Despite her pioneering achievements being largely overlooked during her career, Easley gained posthumous recognition, including induction into the Glenn Research Hall of Fame and a lunar crater named in her honor. After retiring, she remained active in various pursuits, including volunteering and real estate. Annie Easley's legacy is emblematic of the critical yet often unrecognized contributions of women of color in STEM fields.
Subject Terms
Annie Easley
Mathematician and Computer Scientist
- Born: April 23, 1933
- Birthplace: Birmingham, Alabama
- Died: June 25, 2011
- Place of death: Cleveland, Ohio
Significance: Annie Easley was a mathematician and computer scientist who developed programming code essential to the Centaur rocket and other projects, including the 1997 Cassini launch. Initially, Easley was one of only four Black women to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Background
Annie Easley was born on April 23, 1933, in Birmingham, Alabama. Easley and her older brother were raised by their mother in Birmingham during the Jim Crow-era segregation period. Prior to the legislative end to Jim Crow with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, educational opportunities for African Americans were limited by intentionally restricted funding and outdated learning materials. Nonetheless, Easley’s mother instilled in her the importance of education and encouraged her to believe that she could be and do anything she wanted. Easley attended Holy Family High School from the fifth grade onward and graduated as the class valedictorian.
After high school, in 1951, Easley moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, to attend Xavier University, a segregated Black Catholic university. For two years, she studied pharmacy but did not complete her degree and returned to Birmingham. While there, she worked as a substitute teacher. During this period, Easley also tutored Black community members in preparation for the Jim Crow literacy tests required for voter registration. She later moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
Becoming a Rocket Scientist
In 1955, Easley happened upon an article about twin sisters who were working as “human computers” for the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory (later named NASA Lewis Research Center) in Cleveland, Ohio. The lab, which would become NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in 1999, was a branch of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The article about the twins noted that the lab needed people with strong math skills, and Easley fit the bill. She applied and was granted a position with the research lab. When she took the job, Easley had no way of knowing that it would lead to a thirty-four-year career and place her at the core of history-making events for herself, for Black women, for women in science, and for the United States. For some time, Easley was one of only four Black women working in NACA’s staff of 2,500 people.
Easley began her work with NACA performing high-level mathematical computations for the male researchers in the lab. As was the case for her and her peers, much of Easley’s work went unacknowledged and uncelebrated, not only because she was a woman but also because she was a woman of color. At this time in the history of computer science, calculations were done through a process that relied on key-punched paper cards that were fed into machines capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Researchers, however, did not trust the accuracy of these new mechanical computers. Therefore, all of the machine computations were performed and double-checked by human computers. During the evolutionary years of space aeronautics research, NACA evolved as well. In 1958, the federal organization previously known as NACA dissolved, and the space administration that would be known as NASA was born. Eventually, the science of mechanical computers also advanced sufficiently that human computers could be replaced.
For Easley, this change was not the end of a job but the beginning of a dynamic period in her career. Versatile, smart, and never afraid of a challenge, Easley decided to learn computer programming languages. She taught herself Formula Translation (Fortran) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Later, in 1977, as both she and her work evolved, Easley began a degree program in mathematics at Cleveland State University. Unlike her male colleagues at NASA, she was denied employee financial assistance for continuing education. After graduation, Easley began working in the Launch Vehicles Division at NASA. There, she developed and implemented the computer code responsible for analyzing alternative power sources and researching energy conversion systems and battery technologies. These research innovations led to the development of the Centaur upper-stage rocket. The Centaur was the world’s first upper-stage rocket to burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
Easley’s career with NASA was long and productive. Toward the end of her tenure, she accepted the additional role of serving as an equal employment opportunity commission (EEOC) counselor. Through her own experience, she was able to assist supervisors in addressing gender, race, and age concerns in the workplace. After retirement, Easley continued to serve on the NASA Speakers Bureau. She died on June 25, 2011.
Impact
Easley’s computational programming work was essential to the development of the second-stage rocket system and the Centaur upper-stage rocket itself. The Centaur rocket made possible some of NASA’s most important scientific research missions over a fifty-year period. The Centaur rocket was used to boost satellites into the Earth’s orbit and propelled several probes into space. Most notably, the Centaur project made possible the 1997 launch of the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn. Satellites launched by Centaur revolutionized communications. The research program at Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory involved and relied upon a complex reseach and development process that, in turn, depended upon the computer programming work of Easley and other team members in the lab. In 2015, Easley was posthumously inducted into the Glenn Research Hall of Fame and in 2021, a crater on the moon was named after her.
The contributions of Easley and her peers at NASA were largely concealed by the male-dominated culture at large and within NASA itself. Margot Lee Shetterly’s book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016), brought to light the contributions of these talented women. The book also prompted the 2016 film, Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi.
Personal Life
In 1954, Easley married a man who was in the military. By the time Easley went back to college in 1977, she was divorced from her spouse. She did not remarry, nor did she have any children. After retirement, she did volunteer work, traveled the world to ski, and became an independent contractor in real estate.
“Annie Easley.” Cleveland State University Alumni Association, 2021, www.csualumni.com/stay-connected/fascinating-alumni-2015-2016/annie-easley/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2021.
"Annie Easley, Computer Scientist." NASA, 7 Aug. 2017
“Centaur: America’s Workhorse in Space.” NASA, 7 Aug. 2017, www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/history/centaur.html. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.
Collazo, Julie Schwietert. “NASA’s Hidden Figures: The Unsung Women You Need to Know.” Biography, 26 May 2020, www.biography.com/news/hidden-figures-movie-real-women. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.
Easley, Annie J. “NASA Headquarters Oral History Project: Annie J. Easley.” Interview by Sandra Johnson. In Cleveland, Ohio, 21 Aug. 2001, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral‗histories/NASA‗HQ/Herstory/EasleyAJ/EasleyAJ‗8-21-01.htm. Accessed 15 Apr. 2021.
Holt, Nathalia. “The Women Who Brought Us the Moon.” PBS, 3 June 2019, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/chasing-moon-women-who-brought-us-moon/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2021.
Mills, Anne K. “Annie Easley, Computer Scientist.” NASA, 7 Aug. 2017, www.nasa.gov/feature/annie-easley-computer-scientist. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.
Samorodnitsky, Dan. “Meet Annie Easley, the Barrier-Breaking Mathematician Who Helped Us Explore the Solar System.” Massive Science, 26 Nov. 2018, massivesci.com/articles/annie-easley-facts-stem-mathematician-nasa-scientist-discrimination/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2021.