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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: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @09:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @09:20AM (#450980)

    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.

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:17PM (#451023)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:28PM (#451092)

    You're so full of shit, dude. How many diverse cocks have you eaten today?