Let's try this again. Apparently these women calculated trajectories for the Mercury/Apollo missions (also they're making a movie of them, hence pic related). What exactly does that entail and was it important or not? Woman on the left is named Katherine Johnson, if you want to wiki for more details.
I'm just trying to understand their actual contributions.
Doesnt take a genius to use a slide rule and know parametric equations.
Justin Young
>these women calculated trajectories for the Mercury/Apollo missions Did the calculate it by themselves ?
Andrew Young
One of them wrote a foundational paper for computational methods in astronomy as a result.
What is this, anyway? Some poorly veiled attempt to discredit some old black ladies because somebody acknowledged work they did? Are you really that insecure?
Angel Perez
You have to understand that during that time
Joshua Nguyen
I would the one in the middle
Dominic Moore
It's actually a thinly-veiled attempt at the exact opposite, employing the Internet Law of Productive Contrarianism.
But really I did want Veeky Forums's take on what they were doing. Wiki says they performed calculations sent from engineering, were they literally human calculators for everything the engineers couldn't do in their heads?
Logan Smith
Would this thread exist if they were white men? Of course not.
Isaac Thomas
Good for them.
If the movie isn't a documentary it will probably be boring.
Joseph Phillips
yeah, bottom right? I feel ya there
Christian Adams
Plenty of white people have articles on Wikipedia for things that sre much less impressive.
Michael James
I'm in love
Jayden Wood
Janelle Monae
Brody Sullivan
No, they were computers. NASA hired women to basically sit in a room and crunch numbers together. They didn't calculate anything new, the just did the actual arithmetic. It's an important job, but not some major scientific procedure.
Ian Ortiz
The trailer seems to be implying that they did calculate something new.
Xavier Smith
>not knowing this already >making a movie about it
Why is this significant? NASA is a meritocracy. Of course people who work there are going to be doing shit like this.
Jacob Hughes
I love grandmas too
Elijah Taylor
They were very important and in fact there are plenty of stories of these women that did calculations finding errors and flaws in the more respected scientists' calculations and bringing them to them to correct. However, because they were women they were not given the appreciation or recognition they deserved.
Josiah Gonzalez
The trailer starts off with one of them as a little girl rattling off basic geometric terms. This is supposed to signal to the audience that she is some kind of genius. Sound like what dumb people think smart people sound like.
Christopher Roberts
They were a bunch of highly trained apes. Women excel at rote work. It's innovation that they have no capacity for.
Ryan Hill
They were more than just calculators, they also formulated mathematical methods for calculating trajectories and methods to determine the position of a spacecraft: crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Katherine_Johnson
TL;DR some of them were applied mathematicians
Charles Ross
Back in the day human calculator was an actual career path that mainly employed women. Much of our mathematics education system is still built around the idea of training people to mindlessly perform computations quickly.
That said, these women weren't just human calculators.
Grayson Price
lul you are one isolated angry dude
Joseph Bailey
If we found his profile on any social media he would have TRUMP 2016, PROUD WHITE MALE MRA in his description.
Carter Long
what have you innovated
have you even done anything to qualify as a highly trained ape
Adrian Thompson
WE WUZ CALCULATORS N' SHEEEIITTT
Jonathan Kelly
Well pretty much everyone is a trained ape when you get down to it.
Lucas Campbell
>Plenty of white people have articles on Wikipedia for things that sre much less impressive.
But do they have movies made about them?
Eli Davis
Well, there was that movie about that retarded White guy who went biking in the desert even though everyone told him it was a bad idea and then a rock fell on his arm and he had to cut it off with his credit card.
I'm still not sure why he became famous.
David Harris
Imho, these women were noteworthy, but you know this movie will trivialize there successes in order to portray white people as systematic oppressors. This film will shed a destructively green light on them.
Adam Anderson
Pathetic, get out of stem
This argument is meaningless. Get out of stem.
Absolutely. The people who aren't monkey see monkey do are in textbooks.
Jace Cooper
>was it important to know the trajectories >for the Mercury/Apollo missions What do you think?
Matthew Anderson
Aww, did I struck a nerve? This board is not an echo chamber to feed your delusions.
Nicholas Wilson
No problem with this movie, its looks like it'll be written and promoted with a little too much "take THAT, white/men!!", that said id much prefer a movie about the ethical struggles nasa had dealing with the paperclip nazis.
Kayden Long
Impressive, i didnt know women could do math in general.
Jaxon Cook
WE
Ayden Wilson
Didn't some mathematician teach his mother to do calculations for him so he didn't have to waste his time on them?
Why isn't there a movie about her?
Christian Price
>3rd african american woman to get phd in math
and just look at the progress we've made since then lol! thanks to affirmative action programs, universities graduate female african american math phds by the boatload.
Ryder Perez
Nigga whuttt How many thread in this shifty board eternally suck von newman dicks ------------> here is the door
Jonathan Lewis
You're clearly too stupid to get a rise out of me
Carson Stewart
I hope they don't go too extreme with it. I mean, it's no doubt they would have faced hate/doubt/ from their white co-workers or overseers in such a time.
Tyler Ward
lol, you're pathetic
Jonathan Ward
>Get out of stem
Get out of stem
Bentley Nguyen
...
Ryder Carter
*tips fedora* Nice meme, friend. Make sure to stockpile them to keep your Autism from triggering.
Dominic Campbell
The first "programmers" were also women. At the time what they did was considered very important but still something which a good secretary could learn to do.
I hope this movie doesn't try to compare them to the male scientists they worked for, nasa was crawling with geniuses at the time. Theres no reason this can't be an inspirational movie about a bunch of nasa secretaries who just happened to be black women. The behind the scenes perspective these women would have had during apollo 11 would be an incredible movie without playing the race and gender card.
Robert Hernandez
Oh, its gunna play the race and women card. If they do just enough, itll make the movie good, but if they do what hollywood has been doing for the last decade, itll be the focus.
Benjamin Watson
Just watch the trailer. It's 120% black sass showing that whitey in command would be helpless without them.
Mason White
Back then using those first primitive computers and doing calculations was considered a woman's job.
>muh white oppression >muh racist cops >muh strong independent black woman >muh equality >muh struggle >"we aint there because we wear skirts. We're there because we wear glasses." >little 2nd grade black girl spontaneously proving algebra, not solving it, after just naming shapes >we wuz kangs!!!
Nathan Taylor
wow this movie looks shitty, don't plan on seeing this.
>>spontaneously proving algebra wtf are you talking about she's just finding roots of a wicked simple equation, she gets first two roots right (1 and -7) i can't make out the bottom half of the board but should simplify to 2(x+1/2) and (x-3) to get -1/2 and 3 for the second two roots.
Actually maybe I will watch the movie just to see if she gets the last two roots right, the suspense is killing me.
The audience isnt going to see algebra. Most of the audience wont know what to do with x. She is solving proofs of algebra to the audience. You and I know better, but the audience doesnt.
Jordan Powell
katherine johnson co-authored quite a few papers, every one of them she worked with Harold a. Hamer, Hamer has written quite a few more reports and is the sole author of some, so he is clearly in the higher pay grade. It looks like this Harold Hamer probably specifically asked her to work with him.
Johnson was a research mathematician by training and graduated college at age 18 with a degree in math and french, looks like she took graduate level classes at West Virginia University but never completed a doctoral program.
This is no secretary, and clearly was a child prodigy especially in math. However it doesn't appear that she was made co-author for discrimination reasons, Hamer was a top tier engineer or scientist at langly research center who got shit done but he doesn't even get a foot note on johnsons wikipedia page let alone have his own page. Yes the papers she worked on are technically quite advanced even by engineering standards, but this is nasa's bread and butter and advanced math skills are expected of all scientists and engineers who work there. Her contributions were far above the level of any average secretary, and she was probably quicker at performing calculations than the average engineer at nasa, but she had not been a black woman nobody would give a shit about her.
Not saying she shouldn't be celebrated, black children need inspirational role models as much as white children. Young children especially are not color blind and knowing that a black woman like her could contribute with the engineers at nasa, is a great motivator for some kids. Although realistically she looks more mixed race, but i'll let /pol argue about IQ and skin color correlations. She was smarter than I am, I would never get hired at nasa even as a research assistant.
Ethan Jones
I wouldn't believe this even if it was true, but it's not.
Joshua Allen
>science and math >lets talk about these women coz they're black
get this garbage out of here
Logan Adams
That was a question, not an argument, you dumb ape.
Eli Baker
You can use an question to assert an argument. The question had an obvious answer, but the question has been asked to make a point.