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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Ars Technica has a story [arstechnica.com] and a link to the trailer [youtu.be] of an upcoming movie, Hidden Figures which is due in theaters on Friday, January 13, 2017.

This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.

Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson [wikipedia.org] (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson, now retired, was a mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. The movie is your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise, including college at the age of 15. She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.

[...] Based on a book that comes out next month [amazon.com], Hidden Figures is also a personal story about Johnson's struggles and her friendships with two other black women working at NASA, engineer Mary Jackson (the incredible Janelle Monáe) and mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). But most of all, this is just one of those feel-good geek stories about how math can actually change the world.

[...] As anyone who has ever watched NASA TV during a Mars landing knows, a spaceship is only as good as its makers. There is intense drama going on behind the scenes during every flight and landing, and that's why Hidden Figures looks like such a great ride. The movie hits theaters on January 13, 2017.

I am struggling to fathom having to perform manual calculations of orbital trajectories all day — with nothing more than paper, pencil, and a slide rule — and knowing that if you make an error, there's a good chance something is going to go BOOM and probably take some lives with it. Gives fresh meaning to the term meeting a deadline.

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