Hidden Figures


merjet

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My wife and I saw Hidden Figures. We much enjoyed it. It's about three Afro-American women mathematicians who worked at NASA in the 1960's.

It brought back memories of the state of technology then -- bulky main-frame computers fed by punch cards, clunky and noisy desktop electro-mechanical calculators (link), etc.
 
One of the woman worked in a department of NASA that did space flight trajectory computations. She was hired because she knew analytic geometry, something others in the department apparently didn't know and I took in high school in the 1960's. I was puzzled that (apparently) they hadn't been using any calculus -- which is more advanced than and founded upon analytic geometry. The woman introduces and uses Modified Euler's Method, which is a bit of calculus. What does Baal say?
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1 hour ago, merjet said:

My wife and I saw Hidden Figures. We much enjoyed it. It's about three Afro-American women mathematicians who worked at NASA in the 1960's.

It brought back memories of the state of technology then -- bulky main-frame computers fed by punch cards, clunky and noisy desktop electro-mechanical calculators (link), etc.
 
One of the woman worked in a department of NASA that did space flight trajectory computations. She was hired because she knew analytic geometry, something others in the department apparently didn't know and I took in high school in the 1960's. I was puzzled that (apparently) they hadn't been using any calculus -- which is more advanced than and founded upon analytic geometry. The woman introduces and uses Modified Euler's Method, which is a bit of calculus. What does Baal say?

Sounds a bit oversimplified.  However most of the engineers used pre-derived formulas which were gotten by using advanced mathematical analysis.  once they had the formulates they could apply them by plugging in the numbers.  By the way, in the pre-Apollo days most of the computation was done using slide rules. Pocket transistorized computers were a decade or more away.  Anything really complicated had to be done using main frame computers.

For advanced physics we had to use high powered math reduced to numerical approximation schemes which were programmed using high level languages such as Fortran (still in use today, btw along with COBOL for business applications).  It was writing those programs where the advanced math met the software.   I remember back to Lincoln Laboratory about 1964 where a mathematician  Mike Cohn wrote software that computed the results of Einstein's  field equations  (all properly constrained to be linear). He used to feed in a case of punched cards  three feet long to input his numerical data. Then the IBM 360 would blink for an hour with its tape drivers spinning madly as it did iterations to get  solutions  for various tensors that Einstein's field equations require. That was about as mathematically advanced as it got.  Way beyond analytic geometry. In those  days analytic geometry was an integral part of a calculus or differential equations  course taught at college level.  Now they start teaching elementary calculus in the 10 th grade. 

Things have advanced so far  that your disk top or lap top computer has more computing power than a room full of disks  (all with less than a gigabyte storage) controlled by an IBM 360  (an equivalent non-IBM  machine). I started software and applied mathematical work a Livermore (the H-bomb factory)  in the late 1950's.  In those days using computer  was costed out at $800.00 (1958 dollars) per hour.   Now you could  do more in two minutes  with a $400 (2010 dolars) desktop or laptop.   If you scale back to 1960 money, the fanciest lap top now costs around $100 (1960 dollatr) out of packet. 

You had to be in the business to see how fast things advanced.  Its enough to make one's head swim.

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I haven't seen the film, but if the claim is that these women were essential to NASA (in other words the flights wouldn't have happened or would have taken a lot longer) is there any evidence that this is true?

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1 hour ago, Neil Parille said:

I haven't seen the film, but if the claim is that these women were essential to NASA (in other words the flights wouldn't have happened or would have taken a lot longer) is there any evidence that this is true?

Only one of the three, Katherine G. Johnson, wrote formulas for and calculated flight trajectories. (Some number-crunching or programming assistance may have been done by the other two working in a different department, but the movie is sketchy about that.) Read the Wikipedia articles about the movie and Johnson including the bits about John Glenn, which the movie depicts. 

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1 hour ago, Neil Parille said:

I haven't seen the film, but if the claim is that these women were essential to NASA

I don't know if that is ''the claim."  I am more inclined to think these women were remarkable, not that there would be no successful Mercury flights without their work. As human 'computers,' it can be argued that the work was essential, important, necessary for success. But that makes a smaller claim than that NASA or the Mercury programme success rests upon these women.

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(in other words the flights wouldn't have happened or would have taken a lot longer) is there any evidence that this is true?

Well, since the claim is not in evidence to examine, further evidence in support of the claim is unnecessary.  A cynic might say, "ho hum, black female math whizzes in NASA structure," and conclude that the whole movie is a Disneyfied attempt to valorize black female STEM workers. Why them, why now?  What is so significant about a segregation-era success by skilled individuals?

A review at IMDB sez: "In heartwarming, crowd-pleasing fashion, Hidden Figures celebrates overlooked – and crucial – contributions from a pivotal moment in American history." 

And a useful page at NASA for the curious, Katherine Johnson at NASA Langley Research Center

 

Edited by william.scherk
Added more heart warming.
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