If you want the true story, books are usually a better bet than the movie. The movie seemed quite in line with the book, but there were a few things. The two hour movie obviously had to leave a lot of stuff out that was in the book. There was also a time one of the ladies was at a chalkboard. She was impressing the room with the math she was doing. Some of it was a little unrealistic. Most people can't rattle off sin(23) to ten-thousandths place from memory - stuff like that. But, I'm quibbling. The movie was really good.
I got the book. And to be honest, I did some skimming in parts. I may get around to reading every word at some point, but that will be a ways off. There were a couple of cool things dealing with math applications that I thought was interesting. First of all, the book is Hidden Figures and is written by Margo Lee Shetterly. There. I hope that covers me from violating any copy write issues. Regardless, here we go.
Where do systems of equations take place in real life? Well check this out: "Modeling flight at transonic speeds was a particularly knotty problem, because of the subsonic and supersonic winds that passed over the plane or model simultaneously. Aerodynamic equations describing transonic airflows might contain as many as thirty-five variables. Because each point in the airflow was dependent on the others, an error made in one part of the series would cause an error in all the others. Calculating the pressure distribution over a particular airfoil at a transonic speed could easily take a month to complete for the most experienced of mathematicians." (pages 137, 138)
I once had the father of a student tell me about an older child of his that was in the NASA astronaut program. He said that their astronauts had to have a very good mathematics background in case something happened to the on-board computers. Another part of this book spoke to that issue: "An astronaut stranded hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth is like a mariner from a previous age, adrift in the most remote part of the ocean. So what do you do when the computers go out? This was precisely the question Katherine [Johnson] and her colleague Al Hamer had asked in the late 1960s, during the most intense preparations for the first Moon landing. And in 1967, Johnson and Hamer coauthored the first of a series of of reports describing a method for using visible stars to navigate a course without a guidance computer and ensure the space vehicle's safe return to earth. This was the method that was available to the stranded astronauts aboard Apollo 13." (page 248)
Speaking of outer space, I give both the book and the movie, four stars.
