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"Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Mon
by uptown 7y ago
"Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth."
The quality of work, done by hand, is just staggering when you think of the consequences that could have transpired if mistakes had been made.
- vidanay 7y agoNo, the quality of work (and quantity) is staggering, unconditionally.
- TrickyRick 7y agoBut it's extra staggering considering the consequences which I'm sure is what OP meant :)
- DamnYuppie 7y agoUp until the last 40 years of human history almost everything was calculated and drawn by hand. Every building, machine, road, bridge, airplane, ship, and everything else was designed by hand with pen and paper. Given the times doing what they did would not be unexpected, i.e. doing a good job by hand. This doesn't take away from the work and accomplishment. But I see it more as a job well done then something truly out of the ordinary for the times.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 7y agoDigital desktop calculators were a thing since late 1960s, and helped a lot with these hand-driven calculations. They were large boxes with nixie tubes, the size of a modern midi-tower PC, only horizontal. They were limited to relatively simple operations, like square root or ln. They were more precise than a slide rule, though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rrss 7y agoDoes anyone know how this fits with the many digital computers NASA used for mission planning (inc. trajectory planning)? See e.g. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19680020624 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19680020624 for Gemini.
- trca 7y agoAccording to Hidden Figures (which to the best of my knowledge is quite accurate in representing Katherine Johnson), she actually hand checked most if not every calculation performed by the digital computers and often found miscalculations due to programming errors.
- mdiesel 7y agoDigital computers were in their infancy - at one point in that brilliant movie the critical calculations are passed through the digital computer twice and got different answers. Katherine was asked to repeat the calculations and her result was then used. The movie also shows Dorothy Vaughan teaching themselves how to program those first machines. Remember that pretty much noone had any programming experience, and there are still pitfalls today for people doing science calculations on a computer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 19870213 7y agoJohn Glenn apparently refused to fly based on the number of the computers unless Katherine Johnson checked them first.
- divbzero 7y agoThis was dramatized in Hidden Figures but apparently based on fact: [1] > As a computer, she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Even after NASA began using electronic computers, John Glenn requested that she personally recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight aboard Friendship 7 – the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth. [1]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-loved-to-count https://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-...