Yes, those engineers had to check their work because the boss said so, but the boss also gave them the reason why… because getting the answer right is important. And America’s greatest engineering and scientific minds will not have a problem with having their work checked.” So this Space Task Group will be as advertised.

And because it’s never been done … everything we do between now and then is going to matter: it’s going to matter to their wives, their kids, I believe it’s going to matter to the whole damn country. “Do I need to remind everyone…that we are putting a human on top of a missile and shooting him into space? It’s never been done before. In response to his objection, Harrison gave a speech about the importance of the task, and that no one is above having his or her work checked. When Katherine Johnson was asked by her new boss to check the work of the lead engineer, Paul Stafford, Mr. Earth’s gravity keeps pulling it, but it’s going so fast that it keeps missing the Earth – that’s how it stays in orbit.”Īll need to be encouraged to check their work.

Delivers the capsule into an elliptical orbit. Stafford: “The Atlas Rocket can push us into orbit. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty straight-forward from there…” So, if you move all the terms over to one side, you can put the quadratics into a form that can be factored, allowing that side of the equation to equal zero. Katherine as an 8-year old child prodigy: “If the product of two terms is zero, then common sense says at least one of the two terms has to be zero to start with. Hollywood has a track record for flunking math and science in movies, however, in this one, they earn a stellar score. The movie got the math and the science right. The distance from launch to orbit is known. “What’s there tells the story if you read between the lines. Katherine upon being questioned about how she knows that one type of rocket is needed over another: We math teachers are currently implored to replace meaningless busy work with relevant intellectual work. The work referenced here is the kind of work that educators are called to teach in the 21 st Century classroom. Ruth (Katherine’s colleague) on Katherine’s last day on the Space Task Group: “You did good work around here.”Īl Harrison after John Glenn was returned safely to earth: “Nice work, Katherine.”ĭorothy instructing the other women in reference to Katherine re-computing John Glenn’s critical re-entry coordinates: “Alright, give her space. They can do the work.” *Īl Harrison in response to a politician’s inquiry: “That’s the math we don’t have yet, gentlemen. Several times in the movie there was reference made to the “work” done by the various NASA personnel.ĭorothy reference the number of people needed to run the new IBM: “We’re going to need a lot of manpower to program that beast. “This isn’t about plugging in numbers, this is about inventing the math.” In fact, the director the Space Task Group, Al Harrison insisted: Much of the work that was glorified in the movie was the application of mathematics, not calculation with mathematics. They had to visualize geometrically, draw graphs, generate equations, assign units, assess another’s work, creatively program and, yes, solve lots of problems. However, the movies’ three protagonists, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, were all given assignments for which the math went far beyond simple computation. Yes, a team of nearly twenty African-American women was known as “the computers,” because in the days before calculators, computation was done by hand. Here are my reflections from this incredible movie. This true story of the contribution of three black women to NASA’s launching of John Glenn into orbit is full of so many positive messages about math, science, patriotism and social justice that I am compelled to share my perspective as a high school math teacher. It is a film that every educator and math student should see.

It is an amazing, humorous, educational, inspiring and important movie. Everyone in the theater applauded as the credits rolled at the end of the movie, Hidden Figures, and for good reason.

Hidden figures movie worksheet