Before 'Hidden Figures,' there were the Harvard Computers. Now their work has inspired this art

Lia Halloran's big, beautiful maps of stars and other astronomical phenomena at Luis De Jesus gallery pay tribute to a little-known group of female scientists dubbed the Harvard Computers. Annie Jump Cannon, Cecilia Payne, Henrietta Leavitt and others were predecessors of the female mathematicians lionized in the film "Hidden Figures." Beginning in the 1880s, the women worked at the Harvard College Observatory analyzing glass photographic plates of the night sky. They calculated the relative size and distance of the stars and developed a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Smithsonian magazine characterized their work as providing "the empirical foundations for larger astronomical theory," but they have been neglected by history.