Another plot-twist story

She was once a ballerina with the Met Opera company but

"considered her work on the Apollo program to be the highlight of her career. When disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission, it was the Abort-Guidance System that brought the astronauts home safely"

"When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And… oh, yes, the baby was born, too"

baby= Jack Black

To me not even the 1st or 2nd most notable part of the story

"Frustrated with the lack of female role models for girls interested in science, math, and technology, she retired from engineering to write and publish a series of books"

"At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, physicist Barbara Wilson, 50, said she never knew of any female scientists while growing up in the Midwest. At age 10, she started reading science fiction books for inspiration, but none of them featured women..."

"In school, counselors dismissed the idea of her becoming a scientist, saying she should consider jobs that “women are more likely to be good at.” Books like Cohen’s would have provided the validation she sought, said Wilson, JPL’s chief technologist.

..."“It was really difficult psychologically and emotionally to be better than all the boys in math and science,” she said. “[The books by Jack Black's mother] really would have helped encourage my feeling good about myself, that this was the direction I wanted to go"

She was a ballerina, publisher, scientist, role model, environmentalist, parent ... https://kottke.org/19/05/meet-aerospace-engineer-judith-love-cohen

h/t @clapifyoulikeme and @yashar for the mood--

personal coda, I didn't even know a female doctor growing up in rural Minnesota in 80s but only decades later learned my friend's mom was a chemical engineer BUT was not given a job at the mines b/c "need to save if for a man who needs the job for this family" --

-- I do remember she always had the air of a frustrated...something and drank a lot. And also who gets a PhD in chemical engineering and then they treat it like it's a "housewife hobby" or something ?