He encouraged Virginia to study mathematics and physics and made his first slide rule with her when he was 9 years old. As a military family, they moved frequently, living in Panama, Oklahoma, and Bermuda, among other places. Virginia attended five different high schools before graduating as a salutatorian from Germantown High School in Philadelphia.
Her school counselor suggested that she become a librarian, advice which she ignored, applying instead to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was one of a dozen women in her entering class.
One day after graduating in 1947, she married Lawrence Norwood, a graduate student who had been her calculus professor for her third semester. They had three children: Naomi, David and Pedro. The marriage ended in divorce and Ms. Norwood married Maurice Schaeffer, who died in 2010. She is survived by Naomi and Peter; a sister, Barbara; five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
After graduating, Ms. Norwood ran into the prejudices that permeated society, according to the MIT and NASA articles. When she interviewed at Sikorsky Aircraft, she asked for a salary commensurate with the lowest rank in the civil service, but was told the company would never pay a woman that much.
She withdrew her application at a food lab after being asked to promise not to get pregnant.
He had three interviews at Remington, the arms maker, in which he described how a staff mathematician could improve the company’s operations. The hiring manager called to say his idea was brilliant, but the company was going to hire a man in his place.
Desperate, she took a job selling women’s blouses at a department store in New Haven, Conn.
Eventually, she and her husband were hired by the US Army Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. She worked in the weather radar division, where she designed a radar reflector for weather balloons that could detect previously untrackable winds at 100,000 feet.
He later moved into an antenna group, working on antennas that used microwaves, and designed one that remains classified. In 1953, she and her husband moved to California and she began working at Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs in Mountain View, where she set up the company’s first antenna laboratory.