"I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem."
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."
- Peter Drucker
Mary Jackson (1921–2005) was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its successor, NASA. She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer. Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available by 1979 and realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both NASA's federal women's program and the affirmative action program. Her work sought to influence the career paths of women in science, engineering, and mathematics positions at NASA. Jackson is one of the leading characters in the 2016 book Hidden Figures and one of the three protagonists in the book's film adaptation, released the same year. This NASA photograph of Jackson was taken in 1979.Photograph credit: NASA; restored by Adam Cuerden
Our culture is full of fiction, entire fictional universes inhabited by millions of fictional characters. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that seeks to describe facts and opinions about reality. When writing about fiction, please be sure to establish the necessary context for the reader, so that it is clear that the article describes a fictional entity from a specific work. It is also often a good idea to combine many minor fictional characters or places into a single article about the fictional realm in question, especially when there is only a very limited amount that could be said about each of them.
.svg){kind=small}
.jpg)
