SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by eof on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:11PM
You could read the book the movie is based on and check its references. As for your web check, it has often happened that the public face of efforts were men even when the work was done by others. Another recent fictionalization of this is the Amazon series "Good Girls Revolt". It depicts the behind the scenes research and writing for magazine articles done by women which ended up under the bylines of men. I happen to know a woman who worked under this system back in the fifties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:41PM
Men also worked under such a system; the difference is that they didn't think it was a gender issue, just a human issue.
(Score: 3, Touché) by eof on Monday January 09 2017, @06:36PM
It becomes a gender issue when the only people who get credit are men. That leaves the impression to later generations that women have never done anything and probably can't.