Katherine Johnson Hidden Figures

Abstract

The movie Hidden Figures focuses on two major points. The movie title has two different meanings. The Hidden Figures of NASA, the black women who helped the US become victorious in the Space Race with Russia. Second, the Hidden Figures in a mathematical sense, with the differential equation called the Euler’s method, to describe the path of a moving object with possible changing forms. This movie focuses on a woman named Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, a black woman with a PhD in Mathematics, and completed trajectory analysis for the first instance of human spaceflight. Even with these qualifications, she was often discarded from being permitted to handle the capsule due to her race and gender, a massive issue in the

Blacks were segregated with whites, given less privileges, and overall given less quality lifestyles, despite being just as capable and intelligent as whites. Women were treated as lesser than, they were not paid equally nor were allowed to be in better jobs. So those factors combined, a black woman, would likely be the most discriminated against of them all. They were not even considered capable of using math, but aboard “Friendship Capsule 7” all of these false viewpoints were broken in the blink of an eyes, at least for the NASA crew. A woman by the name of Katherine Johnson, often addressed as a “human computer”, used an ancient mathematical function named “Euler’s Method” to discover the approximate trajectory required to send astronauts into orbit in space which marked a turning point in the United States’ favor in the Space Race, but not before pushback from her white coworkers (Meyers, 2017). However, this pushback soon came to an end, as the NASA employees soon discovered that Katherine Johnson was the best there was with numbers, a woman with a PhD in Mathematics and coauthor of “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position” (Loff, 2016), a talent that no one could possibly ignore. She was able to save the life of John Glenn, who was to board the Friendship Capsule 7, the first American to orbit the

Her skills in Geometry allowed her to “make the difference between life and death, and between progress and tragedy” (Garber, 2017). She understood that the capsule would change direction and speed as it went, like a current (Meyers, 2017). That gravity is a constant factor that would influence the capsule as it got further or closer to Earth, calculating points and combining them, something the white men at NASA failed to