{"id":13640,"date":"2017-01-05T11:48:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T16:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=13640"},"modified":"2017-01-05T11:48:34","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T16:48:34","slug":"what-did-the-people-in-the-book-hidden-figures-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/05\/what-did-the-people-in-the-book-hidden-figures-do\/","title":{"rendered":"What did the people in the book Hidden Figures do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The movie Hidden Figures<\/em><\/a> is out in theaters. We’re planning on going to the theater as soon as our presence is not required in the house every single evening, i.e., in 2033. I looked at the book on which the movie<\/a> is based last night. This title is\u00a0Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race<\/em>. I.e., it contains the word “mathematicians.”<\/p>\n

I majored in math in college due to a mistaken belief that I was intelligent. So I was eager to see some equations. Yet the book is solid prose. The only numbers are page numbers, basically. Certainly there are no equations. Instead of the festival of LaTeX<\/a> that I expected, the book could have been authored via text message.<\/p>\n

So… what did the NASA employees chronicled in this book actually do?<\/p>\n

[Note that I was myself a NASA employee in 1978(!), developing a database management system for Pioneer Venus<\/a> Orbiter data to support physicists writing analysis code. The PDP-11\/70<\/a> that I used\u00a0has disappeared because hardware engineers have made so many advances since the mid-1970s. The computer language that we used<\/a>, however, which was developed by John Backus in 1957, is alive and well today. What does the survival of Fortran tell us about progress in computer software and computer science?]<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n