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Katherine Johnson, the "human computer".


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Wikipedia provides a few pertinent details off the bat:

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is an African American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician. She made fundamental contributions to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA.

Particularly compelling to me was the oral history capture there:

At first she worked in a pool of technical women performing math calculations, known as computors. Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual "computers who wore skirts." Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine's knowledge of analytic geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues to the extent that "they forgot to return me to the pool." While the racial and gender barriers were always there, Katherine says she ignored them. Katherine was assertive, asking to be included in editorial meetings (where no women had gone before.) She simply told people she had done the work and that she belonged.

Like pain and/or failure in Atlas Shrugged, she regarded it as inessential. Particularly telling to the same mindset as highlighted in the last two sentences—from the Digg article linked from Vanity Fair:

“In math, you’re either right or you’re wrong,” she said. Her succinct words belie a deep curiosity about the world and dedication to her discipline, despite the prejudices of her time against both women and African-Americans. It was her duty to calculate orbital trajectories and flight times relative to the position of the moon—you know, simple things. In this day and age, when we increasingly rely on technology, it’s hard to believe that John Glenn himself tasked Katherine to double-check the results of the computer calculations before his historic orbital flight, the first by an American. The numbers of the human computer and the machine matched.

 

It's not difficult to relate to a comparable article regarding the number of scientific errors found relying on computerized programs.

. . . researchers note that Excel isn't the only spreadsheet program with overly aggressive autoformatting issues — the same errors crop up in open-source programs like LibreOffice Calc and Apache OpenOffice Calc too.

I've noticed Excel switch the field type when not wanted. I've encountered other programs that do not match the results for the same problem solved on paper with pencil. In many lines of work, an undetected error in a computer output may result in additional costs to correct it when it is discovered during its physical implementation.

John Glenn tasked Katherine Johnson to double-check the computer output for the upcoming launch. To discover an computer error during the physical implementation of that flight could cost John his life. He was astute enough to recognize Katherine's exceptional talents and call upon her to use them.

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