![]() Jackson successfully petitions a court to be allowed to take engineering classes at an all-white university, without which she could not switch from computing to engineering. While Goble Johnson corrects the calculations of a department full of white male engineers, finally enabling NASA to catch up with its rival in the USSR, Vaughan harnesses the opportunity to become the first person to master the programming of NASA’s first IBM computer, cleverly making herself indispensable as technology shifts and human computers become obsolete. These three black women all possess incredibly sharp technical minds and talents, outperforming their male (and white) counterparts over and over again. ![]() Henson, is seconded by mathematician-turned-computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson, likely the first black female aerospace engineer (Janelle Monáe). The character of Goble Johnson, portrayed by Taraji P. Hidden Figures uncovers a little known but intensely moving story (this writer practically felt like crying from start to finish) of a group of female African-American mathematicians employed as ‘human computers’ by the nascent NASA to perform orbital calculations and interpret data from wind tunnel tests and research departments. The door slamming in her face is that of a NASA control centre, which is just about to shoot John Glenn into the orbit and for which she doesn’t have the necessary clearance, despite being indispensable to the mission’s success. She is Katherine Goble Johnson – a genius mathematician and main character of the Oscar-nominated biopic Hidden Figures. She can do the job better than anyone around, but still has to comply with the humiliating segregation laws of early 1960s America. She’s been there way too many times, but it always hurts the same. The little-known story of Johnson and her fellow “human computers” turned into a feature film entitled Hidden Figures, which will be released in 2017.The wooden door slams in her face. ![]() The last was in 2015, when President Barack Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor: the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her 3-decade work in NASA. ![]() Johnson has been honored with a number of awards for her outstanding contributions to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs. Until her retirement in 1986, Johnson continued working for NASA, helping develop its Space Shuttle Program and Earth Resources Satellite. Moreover, her contributions helped ensure the safe return of Apollo 13 after experiencing a malfunction in space. Even though NASA started using electronic computers to perform calculations to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, Glenn asked Johnson to double check the computers’ calculations to check their accuracy.īy time, NASA depended more on electronic computers yet, Johnson performed the accurate calculations for the historic trip to the Moon, Apollo 11, in 1969. In 1961, she was in-charge to calculate the trajectory for Alan Shepard, who was the first American in space one year later, Johnson was involved in another challenge: John Glenn’s trip around the Earth. Thanks to her excellence in geometry, and her accuracy in mathematical calculations, Katherine Johnson was nominated to join the team determining how to send a human into space and back. They were performing the computers’ work before NASA adopted electronic computers that is why this group was known as “human computers”. They were mainly responsible for reading the data from the black boxes of airplanes, in addition to performing all the mathematical calculations for technological developments. In 1953, Johnson joined a group of women working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), known later as NASA. Following graduation, she chose mathematics as her career, as she was fascinated with numbers since she was ten. She graduated high school at the age of fourteen, and college at the age of eighteen. Just like all African–American girls at that time, Katherine had few opportunities to continue her education that is why her family had to move to another city so that she could join high school. The African–American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in a small town in West Virginia, USA.
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