Box of delight

Editor's Note: This story originally gave the time it takes light to travel from the sun to Earth as just over eight seconds. The correct time is just over eight minutes. Your editor is very embarrassed.

Earth spins at 1,040 mph. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. It takes just over eight minutes for sunlight to reach Earth; light from the moon reaches us in just under 1.5 seconds. Light travels so far in a year that we use shorthand to describe that 13-digit unit of distance when mapping celestial bodies; the star nearest to our sun is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years away.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY’S Hidden Figures is the story and celebration of the four dozen unsung black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from 1943 to 1980 for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). More precisely, it is a historical homage to the fearlessness of mathematical minds too brilliant to be hindered by racism and sexism — to women who walked away from traditional, low-paying teaching jobs and marched into a predominantly white, segregated work force that considered them, in Shetterly’s words, “invisible and invaluable at the same time.”