New movie celebrates the true geniuses behind Apollo: NASA’s mathematicians

The new trailer for Hidden Figures, in theaters January 13, 2017.

This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.

Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson is a retired mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. It's your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers helped discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise (and college at the age of 15). She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.

What I love about this story is how it celebrates the minds behind the space program. Based on a book that comes out next month, Hidden Figures is also a personal story about Johnson's struggles and her friendships with two other black women working at NASA, engineer Mary Jackson (the incredible Janelle Monáe) and mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). But most of all, this is just one of those feel-good geek stories about how math can actually change the world. Hidden Figures should make for a fascinating companion piece to movies like Apollo 13 and Gravity, which celebrate astronauts while putting scientists mostly into the background. Possibly only The Martian has thus far successfully shown the drama of science unfolding alongside the drama of being an astronaut (and that was science fiction, of course, rather than a retelling of actual events).

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Source: www.arstechnica.com/