Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly · first published 2016
50% recommend40% neutral10% critical
Why HN recommends it
Narrative history of the Black women mathematicians at NACA and NASA whose calculations supported early spaceflight. It covers the era and its workplace history in depth.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics indu
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…First Evolutionists The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Hidden Figures Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History Knocking On Heaven's…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite non-fiction books of all time?” ↗…respond with "congratulations to everyone" is like responding to "black lives matter" with "all lives matter". Which either intentionally or not, diminishes the point trying to be made. If you watched Hidden Figures or read the book, I think you would understand why they deserve a little bit of extra congratulations.
…more about this in relation to coops and democratic companies. In a 60 second spike https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-case-against-pay-transparency (:face-palm-cringey-emjoi:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan in the eponymous West Virginia pay transparency law. Excellent book. https://trackbill.com/bill/west-virginia-house-bill-4428-kat... Buffer ranks high in the search…
on “Tell HN: My early access eBook over iOS made $120k in 1 year” ↗As core rope was manufactured by (black and white) women: Regarding how NACA/NASA gave work to black women in times from world war ii until the moon landing, "Hidden Figures" (the book) teached me more about american history of that time than my whole school career. Technology always also influences humans, forms society.
on “ Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer” ↗About "Hidden Figures": It's worth reading the book: Quite a detailled history lesson!
on “Apollo 11: Four lesser-known facts” ↗…partition the memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk - The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 - The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran. - The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry.…
on “Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?” ↗…battleground that proved the superior mettle of its winners. Both extremes are tempting in their clarity; both make for a gripping story. Occasionally—as in Liza Mundy’s Code Girls (2017) or Margot Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016)—a simultaneously individualist and Marxist approach unveils underappreciated digital counter-heroes.
on “Counter-Histories of the Internet” ↗…the ones who helped her write math and physics. Getting all of that criticism out of the way up front, the best parts are the history that really deserves to be known better. She started writing before Hidden Figures came out, but it's worth telling that story several times. Women served as pilots and astronauts, and we should remember both what they did and how they were marginalized by deliberate sexism and racism.…
on “The Lady Astronaut series tackles historical sexism brilliantly” ↗…[article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) (during the space race) At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The…
on “Human Shader” ↗I skimmed the PDF linked there, it consists mainly of two accounts of the _book_ Hidden Figures by two engineers who worked with Katherine Johnson and they both praise her, her work ethic, her skill as a mathematician and do little to marginalize her other than acknowledge that there were many black…
on “Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA (2020)” ↗Wow, "created" seems like a heckuva stretch in this title. It often seems like the intent of this kind of a dishonest title is to imply that so-and-so was the real force behind some thing (see also, Hidden Figures) but was not given credit due to systemic <insert all powerful force of oppression here>. For me, the real effect is to read everything that comes after with extreme skepticism.
on “The Young Women Who Were Tricked into Creating the Atomic Bomb” ↗