![]() ![]() ![]() Jackson started as a computer and went on to become NASA’s first African American female engineer. She later became one of the first programmers to work on NASA’s IBM computer. She was eventually put in charge of the West Computing Group, the home for the African American female computers. Vaughan, the oldest of the three, was a high school math teacher before she joined NACA in the 1940s. John Glenn famously requested that she verify the IBM computer’s calculations before he undertook America’s first full orbital spaceflight. Johnson, a mathematical prodigy and the first black woman to attend the University of West Virginia’s graduate school, was a member of NASA’s Space Task Group during the Mercury mission years. The film, like the book it was based on, follows three African American NASA computers: Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Hidden Figures brings Johnson and her colleagues firmly into the spotlight. The NASA computers were not written out of NASA’s history so much as never included in the first place. Like human computers in other fields such as astronomy and military ballistics, they were “only” doing calculations, which was not considered scientific work. The film’s exchange between Johnson and the fictional Stafford suggests one major reason: Despite the challenging nature of their work, these talented women were seldom given formal credit for their contributions. Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book that inspired the film (see the Physics Today review), said at a recent panel discussion that she is often asked why no one has heard the computers’ stories before. This was especially true for black women. Johnson was one of perhaps 50 African American women who worked as computers at NACA’s segregated Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Talented female mathematicians often had fewer career options than men with math degrees, and they could be hired in larger numbers and at a lower salary. Those computers were almost entirely women. In the days before handheld graphing calculators, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, NASA, relied largely on human computers to perform calculations. When engineer Paul Stafford ( The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons) sees the document, he snappishly tears off the cover sheet and hands it back to her. Henson) types her name on the cover sheet of a NASA report, an act that establishes her coauthorship of the mathematics inside. ![]() Credit: Hopper Stone, TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.Ībout halfway through the new film Hidden Figures, talented “computer” Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Hidden Figures highlights the accomplishments of the African American women who worked as “computers” at NASA during the dawn of the space program. ![]()
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