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Film Analysis: Hidden Figures

Decent Essays

In Hidden Figures the people at NASA are trying to solve a math problem, so they can send someone into space. They are in a race with the USSR to see who can get into space first. John Glenn is the man that would be going into space. He is putting his life in NASA’s hands. He preferred that the numbers/problems that would determine if he lived, worked out.
During this movie, there seems to be a problem with race equality. Not so much of NASA not hiring black people, but with them actually helping out and trying to solve the problem. From the article Hidden Figures and the Appeal of Math in an Age or Inequality, it says “ It’s about winning battles as a result of common interests even as you adversaries have trouble seeing you as a person who …show more content…

They were so desperate to give the black girl a chance. She was so good at numbers that everybody there got past the part that she was black. The people at NASA wanted to win the race so bad that they put away their feelings about race in a different form. Our world could be so much better if we would let everyone have an equal opportunity to improve the math that we have to work with. The math equations were hopefully doubled in Hidden Figures, and so was equality. One problem is in science or space races is that people want credit for what they do. They didn’t want the black girl to solve the problems and be right and her be the one to get acknowledge because that would be awful if that ever happened. That’s not the point though. The point is that it shouldn’t matter who gets the credit because everyone should work together instead of being selfish. If something was wrong with the numbers, someone could’ve died and it would’ve been on NASA’s …show more content…

She stated that it works numerically. What she meant by this was a pathway made up of infinite points, linked by a finite number of calculations, this is an example of numerical approach in math. When Katherine first came up with this idea some of the engineers weren’t to happy about it because they believed that it was old. In my opinion they were just trying to get into her head and make her seem wrong. The thing about Euler’s method was not always can problems be solved. Normally the scientist has to approximate what they think the answer will be, and then find the answers for the specific situations. There was an email written to Inside Science from Horne which said “The work for solving these coupled differential equations was done by the whole team of researchers at NASA and possibly in part by Katherine Johnson.” (Meyer, 2017) I feel like the person that wrote this letter didn’t give Katherine as much credit as she deserved, and more than likely it was because she was black. She was the one that came up with that idea and basically everybody turned her down on it. It it just a matter of who wants the publicity I

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