Posted on 02/24/2020 8:45:32 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose calculations played a major role in the development of the Space Shuttle program, died Monday at the age of 101, NASA confirmed.
Johnson was part of NASA’s “Computer Pool” team in the 1960s, which was largely composed of black women who processed data by hand. They provided the calculations for several of the first successful manned space missions, including Alan Shepard’s in 1961 and John Glenn’s in 1962, when he became the first American to orbit the earth.
Johnson also became the first woman to write a technical report in NASA’s flight research division with a 1960 paper, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,” co-authored with Ted Skopinski. Johnson worked with NASA for nearly three decades before her retirement in 1986.
She was later portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” and accompanied Henson to the 2017 Academy Awards.
Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Obama in 2015 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019.
“We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers,” NASA tweeted.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Per IMDB: "The issue with the bathrooms was not something Katherine Johnson personally experienced. It was actually encountered by Mary Jackson instead. In fact, it was this incident, as a result of Jackson ranting to a colleague, which got her moved to the wind tunnel team. Johnson was initially unaware that the East Side bathrooms were even segregated, and used the unlabeled "whites-only" bathrooms for years before anyone complained. When she simply ignored the complaint, the issue was dropped completely."
We had the pleasure of going to Washington DC last summer when The Park Service used the Washington Monument to broadcast the Apollo 11 Mission. Incredible doesn’t begin to describe it.
There was a little kid behind us who was all amazed at the whole thing. I wanted to reach around and tell him to follow his dreams.
With us was one of our kids. When he was six he said he wanted to work at NASA and build rockets. He’s now 23, is an Astronautical Engineer and works at NASA. Right now he flies satellites.
“also thought it was a stretch the one lady who studied the computer manuals at night figured out the problem the 200 IBM engineers in the movie could never do.”
That’s the number one reason I never watch those shows.
I despise the Left with a passion
Um, no, I didn't say I did. Reading this thread, I'm not sure I should bother to anyway.
saw it as well (on TV- i don’t go to the movies)...loved it...
Yes, it was political but nowhere near as political as the book it was based on. If I had read the book first I never would have spent money in a theater to see it. Kudos to the screen writers.
I agree. Great Movie!
That’s not why she read the manuals. She read them for job security. Computers were going to end their jobs. And I don’t think it was IBM engineers that were the problem, but NASA engineers who weren’t up to speed on these “new” systems.
Exactly what did she do at NASA?
In the pre-computer days, I read that places that needed calculations done on raw data. (I’ll call it numerics! )These places like the Census Bureau performed their numerics with floors of people (usually women!) reading the data off paper records and using mechanical calculators to reduce the data to something that could be used (if the Census Bureau) by statisticians. Since this is the 1960s its at the cusp of the computer revolution, did she take raw data code it up (Fortran, assembly or binary?) and run it on main frames? Then give the results to the NASA (or contractor) scientists? If so that’s great! An important contribution to the team. However a lot of other people did similar things & I see no movies about them!
I don’t know about “political” but it DID reveal the blatant, enforced racism that still existed in the federal gubmint. It nearly took a mission failure for several male @$***les to get down off their white high horses and let those ladies do their jobs; as I recall.
Personally I have always been in favor of hiring the best no matter what the best looks like. That being said does anyone else find it improbable that all of the “human computers” at NASA were black women? Blacks and women were not common in Physics or Math departments in the 40’s-60’s and it’s hard to believe there were not plenty of white, asian and or male mathematicians who were more qualified. Was this some kind of special program?
I ordered the Blu-ray of it today. Only $7.99 at Bezos, Inc.
Well, how we suppose to get to space now????
Spot-on description of the movie!
Data is "coded", algorithms are programmed.
For example, HTML is data, it is coded. HTML is read and displayed by a browser, which is a program.
Here is one article about the historical fraud of “Hidden Figures”:
Another article documenting the fraud:
http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-movie-hidden-figures-is-fake-history.html
“....You don’t “code up” data in FORTRAN. ....”
YES I KNOW THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!
I didn’t feel like writing a technical treatise as a reference work to my question!
I am trying to figure out what these “Significant Figures Did”?
And in my undergraduate days I had to digitize graphs by hand as far as I was concerned I was “coding it up”! I also had to get into the main frame a U-Haul of punch cards XFS data. Again as far as I was concerned I was “coding it up”!
So what did these people do that I should genuflect toward them?
I just want my question answered!
It is interesting to read the link about the actual story.
I found the movie to be compelling and sad at the same time. To see how far the black family has come from a time when they wanted the same things for themselves and their children to see what has happened to so many today.
RIP.
So is it as bad a history as “Red Tails”?
I had people telling me that the Red Tail squadron was solely responsible for winning the air war in Europe in WWII. After I was told that multiple times by supposedly intelligent people I had no interest in seeing them movie.
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