Based in Houston, Jamal Daniel serves as chair of Crest Investment Company. In the course of his three-decade career, Jamal Daniel has founded a number of nonprofit, media, and film ventures, including Levantine Films, which co-produced the 2016 award-winning movie Hidden Figures.
Hidden Figures is based on the true story of a team of African American women working at NASA in the 1950s, when the Space Race was in full swing. Known as the West Computers, these female mathematicians worked as human computers, relieving the engineers of tedious hand calculations and making significant contributions to aircraft design.
The total number of women who worked as human computers at NASA is unknown; estimates range from a few hundred to several thousand. A number of West Computers eventually left the computing pool to work on specific projects such as supersonic flight and the Mercury and Apollo missions.
