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posted by on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the before-computers-were-just-circuitry dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:58AM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:58AM (#450946) Journal

    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.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:24PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:24PM (#451090) Journal

    free gratuities - everyone love 'em, don't they?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Monday January 09 2017, @01:13AM

    by dry (223) on Monday January 09 2017, @01:13AM (#451263) Journal

    To quote wiki,

    she was reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley's Flight Research Division. However, Johnson and other African-American women in the computing pool were also identified as "colored computers" and subject to workplace segregation, working, eating and using restrooms apart from their white peers until the colored computing pool was disbanded in 1958.[10]

    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]