My Dad and I watched 'Hidden Figures' a couple of weekends ago. Its such a great movie. To think that this one person was able to do that floored me.

I told my Dad how lucky we are to be born with various abilities that we then nurture and develop. The sky's the limit when we do the things we were "born" to do.

This lady's mind was really meant to doing such calculations. So good!

I'm not sure if she wanted that attention, but she deserved it. I'm sure, being 97 years old and now getting famous isn't that bad. I can't imagine people taking too many photographs and interviews of here.

It's a great movie. I read a bit about her afterwards. One cool thing is that some of the parts that I assumed were made up by Hollywood to heighten the drama (like Neil Armstrong say "I'm not launching unless she does the calculations") weren't fabricated. That actually happened

It was John Glenn not Neil Armstrong

Whoops, it's been a while since I saw the movie

my understanding is that pretty much the only thing that was fabricated was that these four women were friends.

There aren't that many movies out there about the excitement of a technical career and that movie was a great one.

i also enjoyed the movie, but there was a bit too much creative license applied to push an agenda (for my taste). for something based on a real person and real events, bending the truth for dramatic effect does not sit well with me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Historical_accu...

Did anyone have a go at “October Sky” for pushing an “agenda”?

What was the agenda? I saw the movie once many years ago. I mainly remember it being about kids building rockets.

McDowell County is poorest part of WV with life outcomes and vital statistics worse than ghettoes.

That's the location. But what is the agenda?

The same one people are accusing HF of but with poor whites

HF?

Hidden Figures

i cannot tell you since i have neither seen the movie, nor was i monitoring Reddit comments in 1999.

but i assume that yes, at least a few had a "go" at it, based on statistical probability alone.

Well I saw it in grade school then and I don’t recall any of that

and i don't recall any two-sided debate on any social, political or economic issues in grade school either.

perhaps not everything that can be said about a subject is discussed in grade school?

I think it's okay, as this was a movie for entertainment rather than a documentary.

i think the line is sufficiently blurred since it is based on real people and events. there's a certain level of social contract that comes with this.

I don't think there is such a social contract. As far as I can tell, the only two things Bohemian Rhapsody got right was a) Freddie Mercury was gay, and b) Queen played at Live Aid. One of the villains in the Titanic movie in real life was a hero.

i encourage the downvoters to actually read the wiki entry. some of the central points of drama revolve around an atmosphere and conditions that did not exist at nasa when these events took place. e.g.

"I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."

the primary character clearly states that there was no feeling of segregation, yet the movie centrally revolves around her direct experience of blatant, overt racisim.

imo, the story is amazing/inspirational on its own without this intentional misrepresentation.

Your conclusion is wrong - she admits in the quote you referenced that segregation was there. She does not say it didn't affect her, she says she didn't feel it (as in let it affect her own behavior, cloud her mind, react to it, etc).

To my recollection (I could be wrong it's been years), the movie didn't focus on her feelings about segregation, it focused on the actual segregation and the effects of that segregation on her daily life (i.e. obstacles that would have been in her way), which is distinctly different from her feelings about said segregation and obstacles...which is what she's referring to in the quote.

The book actually touches on this:

"She knew just as well as any other black person the tax levied upon them because of their color. But she didn’t feel it in the same way. She wished it away, willed it out of existence inasmuch as her daily life was concerned.”

MANY members of different marginalized groups deliberately choose this outlook as a method of self preservation in an attempt to minimize the very real emotional, physical, and spiritual toll created by these -isms. Quite a bit of research on the topic if it's something that interests you. But their choice not to acknowledge the source of these obstacles (i.e. racism) doesn't mean it's not there and it doesn't mean there aren't significant challenges...

> The sky's the limit when we do the things we were "born" to do.

I tend to think the sky's the limit, and we all need good mentors. Check out "Stand and Deliver", another great movie, based on a real story.

The NYT article really emphasized her college mentor, William Claytor.

I think it's pretty unfortunate so many people, particularly women and people of color, have gone unrecognized for their accomplishments in their lifetime. It's somewhat heartening to me that she was, however late, recognized properly within her lifetime for her incredible contributions.

Hundreds of thousands of people worked on Mercury and Apollo. How many can you name?

Wow, bold courageous move there. Making a throwaway just to challenge someone pointing out an effect of racism. Everyone thinks you're so incredible. /s

I'm so sorry. I'm just supposed to believe that "so many people, particularly women and people of color, have gone unrecognized for their accomplishments in their lifetime" when Katherine Johnson and Margaret Hamilton are the only NASA ground staff that I can name. Is there anything else you want me to believe?

You're more likely to know their name because of the recent efforts to highlight their work an contributions BECAUSE they were ignored for so long.

I think he has a point though and I don't disparage elevating people like her because she broke gender and racial barriers in addition to making great contributions.

But it was a pretty huge team effort and you will never know of that boring white middle age man who did equally as important engineering or mathematical work.

There is not necessarily wrong with it but it is pretty funny when I think about famous programmers my mind goes to Ada Lovelace, Margret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, Denis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds.

All great programmers and I know others exists but those are the ones I think I hear the most about I think.

> the recent efforts to highlight their work an contributions

Precisely! They have not gone unrecognized unlike the hundreds of thousands of other NASA ground staff.

> they were ignored for so long.

They never were ignored. They have recently been elevated above all the other NASA ground staff.

They didn’t specially mention NASA in their comment. You know of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, but have you heard of Lewis Latimer? Probably not.

> You know of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, but have you heard of Lewis Latimer?

His work was not as significant. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Howard_Latimer#Technical... to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Edison_patents and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nikola_Tesla_patents

Ok. You know of Sally Ride but not Mae Jemison. Their work is equivalent.

You know of Watson and Crick, but not Rosalind Franklin. By you, I mean the general you.

I do know of Mae Jemison and Rosalind Franklin. Mae Jemison and Sally Ride, and Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick have a similar number of page views on Wikipedia, so I think they are all generally known about as well as each other. Maurice Wilkins less so.

In fact, it is you asking people here to believe in your odd and unfortunate worldview.

You are obviously enormously invested in completely ignoring social conditions women and people of color overcame to do what they did.

Of all things, in a thread on the occasion of her death - for a few, what we get is anger and indignation in reading about this woman's accomplishments. Think about that.

A few years ago, a friend of mine summarized Margaret Hamilton's contributions to computing; the post went pretty viral (it sat atop this very site), enough that some other people made copy-cat posts. A couple years later she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I don't think the two events were disconnected...