
'Hidden Figures' NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson to Release Autobiography - ColinWright
https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-katherine-johnson-autobiography-20181220-story.html
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free_everybody
Katherine Johnson is a badass. I need to watch Hidden Figures!

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wl
The movie is entertaining but misleading. If you have the time, check out the
book the movie is based on.

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commandlinefan
> but misleading

I wondered about that when I was watching it. The Katherine Johnson character,
in the movie, had a huge epiphany that "saved" the space program: use Newton's
method to find roots of polynomials! I groaned out loud when I saw that - I'm
sure that the actual NASA engineers were very definitely familiar with high-
school calculus (in fact, that's probably what most of the human computers
were doing most of the time). I'm sure that she actually did make
contributions that were profound - so why not just show those? Most of the
audience wouldn't have noticed the difference and you wouldn't have to make it
look like she did the equivalent of coming into a stock trading company and
saying "Have you considered buying low and selling high?"

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jandrese
I think this is why the movie spent so much time on the bathroom issue. Not
only was it a stand-in for many other forms of discrimination, but it's
something the audience could understand with just a high school level math
education.

It's quite possible that the scriptwriters themselves didn't understand the
math and tried to pick out the easiest example they could understand and
translate on the screen.

