The 101 year long life of Katherine Johnson:

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by paddoboy, Mar 2, 2020.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    https://www.universetoday.com/14514...figures-are-important-to-history/#more-145143

    The Life of Katherine Johnson Shows that ‘Hidden Figures’ Are Important to History
    NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson did more than just calculate rocket trajectories for early space missions. Her story, when it was finally told, completely changed people’s perceptions about who has been – and who can be — important in history.

    Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote about Johnson’s life in the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,” called her writing a “recuperative history.” She brought the bits and pieces of people’s lives together to help tell the full story of NASA’s history.

    “The women in ‘Hidden Figures’ upend all our perceptions of what it means to be black, to be female, to be a scientist and to be American,” Shetterly said in a speech at the University of Minnesota in 2017. She added that we need to keep finding and telling “these stories until we have the entire spectrum of the experience, not just the tiny slices of the extremes of good experiences or bad experiences, when most of life happens in the middle.”

    Johnson died this week at the age of 101, and has been lauded an American hero.

    “Ms. Johnson helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. “At NASA we will never forget her courage and leadership and the milestones we could not have reached without her.”

    The “Hidden Figures” book and the 2016 film that followed, tells the stories of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, Christine Darden and others during a time of Jim Crow laws, when blacks were relegated to the status of second-class citizens and lived under the conditions of legal segregation in the southern United States.

    more at link.....
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    Yes, saw the movie and have it stored as one of my favourite science movies along with "Madam Curie" [the 1943 movie with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.]
     
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  3. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    https://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-loved-to-count

    Born in 1918 in the little town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson was a research mathematician, who by her own admission, was simply fascinated by numbers. Fascinated by numbers and smart to boot, for by the time she was 10 years old, she was a high school freshman--a truly amazing feat in an era when school for African-Americans normally stopped at eighth grade for those could indulge in that luxury.

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    Former NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson is seen after President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2015, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
    Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls
     
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