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Ars Technica has an article about the new space race movie Hidden Figures which they describe as "A must-see film about using math to overcome adversity and send humans into orbit". The film centers around a mathematician named Katherine Johnson who played a key role in the Mercury and Apollo projects and the challenges she had to overcome.
There is probably nothing that lifts my spirits more than a movie about heroic scientists sending astronauts into space. Apollo 13 did this masterfully, and The Martian gave it a futuristic twist. And now Hidden Figures has revitalized this quintessentially American tale again, with great success, by focusing on the true story of a group of early NASA mathematicians who plotted Project Mercury's vehicle flight paths in the 1950s and 60s.
Hidden Figures is the perfect title for this film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's exhaustively researched book of the same name. It deals with an aspect of spaceflight that is generally ignored, namely all the calculations that allow us to shoot objects into orbit and bring them back again. But it's also about the people who are typically offscreen in sweeping tales of the white men who ran the space race. What Hidden Figures reveals, for the first time in Hollywood history, is that John Glenn would never have made it to space without the brilliant mathematical insights of a black woman named Katherine Johnson (played with what can only be called regal geekiness by Taraji Henson from Empire and Person of Interest).
Johnson was part of a group of "colored computers" at Langley Research Center in Atlanta, black women mathematicians who were segregated into their own number-crunching group. They worked on NASA's Project Mercury and Apollo 11, and Johnson was just one of several women in the group whose careers made history.
The movie is in theaters now.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:56AM
it is sorta kinda pear-shaped. You can't just assume a spherical distribution of mass, there are land masses and the oceans.
My cousin works with GPS satellites, his apartment is filled with physics textbooks.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday January 08 2017, @03:23AM
well, the earth also has 4 simultaneous days. don't be educated stupid..
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday January 08 2017, @03:31AM
I'm gonna guess in the 60's and 70's this didn't matter. Women doing math was good enough until the newfangled calculators and computers showed up in the 80s.
Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:01AM
She started out that way.
From 1953 through 1958, Johnson worked as a "computer", doing analysis for topics such as gust alleviation for aircraft. Originally assigned to the West Area Computers section which was supervised by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan, she was reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley's Flight Research Division.
Then she became a steely eyed missile woman. The computer becomes the operator.
From 1958 until she retired in 1986, she worked as an aerospace technologist, moving during her career to the Spacecraft Controls Branch. She calculated the trajectory for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, in 1959. She also calculated the launch window for his 1961 Mercury mission. She plotted backup navigational charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures.[citation needed kept] In 1962, when NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit around Earth, officials called on her to verify the computer's numbers because Glenn asked for her personally and refused to fly unless Katherine verified the calculations. Johnson later worked directly with digital computers. Her ability and reputation for accuracy helped to establish confidence in the new technology. She calculated the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon.
(Source [wikipedia.org])
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:58AM
There were already new fangled calculators and computers available at the time. They just took too long to program.
As for the women, TFS says
black women Mathematicians who were segregated
Which didn't happen.
That was gratuitously thrown into the story to beat the injustice drum.
They weren't in the control room, but that doesn't mean they were segregated in any sense of the word.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:24PM
free gratuities - everyone love 'em, don't they?
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Monday January 09 2017, @01:13AM
To quote wiki,
which sounds awfully like segregation to me, something that was usual in those days where black people were often segregated.
Just because you and whoever upvoted you want to revise history doesn't change the facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deadstick on Sunday January 08 2017, @03:35AM
True, with the sorta-kinda in italics. Ask your cousin this: If you made a perfect scale model of the Earth the size of a billiard ball, how would it compare with the manufacturing tolerances for billiard balls?
I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't comment on whether your post is a non sequitur.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:19AM
The technical term is oblate spheroid.
But are you talking about the earth, or the fat Black women that the Jews are trying to say were behind America's space program?
Now, now, before you all label me racist and sexist, I will say that I'm not denying the contributions women made in the space and war efforts of America. Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and many other ladies have a few things to say about that. However, what the Hollywood Jews don't realize is that with the election of Trump the diversity fad is on its way out. Which means that, to the layman, the movie is every bit as patronizing as a 90's era Pizza-hut commercial where all the Blacks are speaking in rhyme against a backdrop of New York Hammond organ music.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @07:09AM
Keep that shit on /pol/ where it belongs. We are trying to hve a society here.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:27PM
fook society
https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--zn5740QD--/t_Preview/b_rgb:191919,c_limit,f_jpg,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1469080160/production/designs/594061_1.jpg [cloudinary.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @09:20AM
with the election of Trump the diversity fad is on its way out.
Very close to the stupidest thing every to appear on SoylentNews. Two points:
Trump's election changes nothing.
.
Diversity is only being expanded! Now we are being ask to extend special rights and protections to racists, misogynists, alt-right homophobic homosexuals, and Pence. But you are probably right, this is taking things too far! We should stop with Black female mathematicians.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:17PM
Let me guess. The two prominent "alt-right" (one is a libertarian, not alt-right; the other is just a loudmouth troll so probably again not alt-right) homosexuals are homophobic the same way that women who don't toe the feminist line have internalized misogyny.
I've never believed that government interference is the way forward for LGBT acceptance. LGBT people come in all ideologies. The "gay lifestyle" is a lie. I'm gay, disease-free, and I've never felt any reason why I should adopt the "gay lifestyle" or view AIDS as some normal life stage for a gay man. I'm a big believer in monogamous relationships. Anyway, not to rant.
There is one thing I want to know though. I wasn't immediately certain from reading Wikipedia so forgive me for being superficial, but Johnson does not appear to be black to me. Does she have significant African ancestry? Is she somehow black? I'm afraid I'm not understanding what race has to do with this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:28PM
You're so full of shit, dude. How many diverse cocks have you eaten today?