I found Katherine Johnson's calculations at NASA [video] | Hacker News Reader

I found Katherine Johnson's calculations at NASA [video]

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An article that discusses attribution for the paper:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/08/30/katherine...

'As Johnson later recalled, "Finally, Ted told him, 'Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway.' So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something."'

> Johnson showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade... [1]

The struggle is real.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson#Early_life

It definitely makes you wonder how many brilliant Black minds were/are wasted due to conditions imposed on them by racism/ws.

I've thought about this. The United States was the world leader in science and technology in the 20th century. Imagine how much farther we would be right now if more Black Americans had been in PhD programs instead of trying to avoid being murdered.

Although I know Katherine Johnson was African-American, by looking at pictures of her [1] she actually looks white-skinned to me. Was she considered of black ancestry because of the "one-drop rule" in the USA at the time? Or maybe she was more dark-skinned in her youth and it's only in recent color photographs that she looks white?

Honest question, as here in Europe that woman would be considered "white" if judging from her physical appearance alone. Although I know that there is more than skin color to the American concept of "race".

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Katherin...

Link to the paper at NASA's NTRS:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980227091

Thanks, the tone of voice in the video was very reminiscent of those ASMR videos which I abhor.

Yeah, I've often wondered if that's her normal speaking voice, or if she adopts that particular tone just for her videos.

I also wonder what the correlation might be, between such “wondering” about somebody’s speaking voice and the gender of the speaker.

Right. If you've ever thought somebody sounded weird it's because you're a biggot/racist/sexist/homophobe/other-insult-here and it definitely could not possibly be that the person just sounded a bit strange to you.

The funny part is that I'm a woman myself haha I guess I'm a misogynist!

Internalized oppression!

In my own experience (and being male), I’ve found myself compelled to remind women team members not to be more critical (and/or less forgiving) of each other than they are of male colleagues. Because it happened somewhat regularly.

It’s less about the thinking and more about the unfiltered blurting out such (when they are personal and/or unkind) thoughts in public.

I don't know. I can off-hand think of exactly two Youtubers that I am familiar with, who frequently get comments about how their voice would make good ASMR audio, etc. One is male (the guy from Far North Bushcraft and Survival) and the other is female (Tibees). shrug

This parent comment didn’t seem to be an obvious complimentary comment, like the one’s you’re referencing.

I don't see how you get that. Some people do adopt a particular voice when they narrate, and it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but it can be interesting.

While the work itself is interesting, I'm also super curious to know how this was typeset. Did NASA have special typewriters with common math symbols, or go through some office with a Linotype or early digital typesetter, or something else?

I don't know how NASA did it, but in the 60s and 70s the IBM Selectric typewriters had those replaceable balls and you could swap one in with special math symbols on it.

https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19930/writing-papers-in-p...

Heh, that's a really interesting question. It's easy to forget that not everybody lived in the world of PC's running TeX / LaTeX, and Postscript enabled laser printers, etc. I have no idea how math got typeset back in those days... I'm too young to have any appreciation for that era in that regard.

TeX was specifically written because Knuth was unhappy when his books went from being delicately hand-set by someone to being produced by a computer.

It was the transition of commercial printing technology from "hot lead" typesetting machines (big brothers of the Linotype beasts I helped maintain while in college) to photo-offset, during which the fonts Knuth loved got "left behind" (as so often happens as proprietary tech evolves), that led him to write his own typesetting system. In the early 90s I used both vde with troff and TeX through grad school on a Kaypro 1 running CP/M. TeX was definitely the superior system for the kind of research papers I was writing (Chicago Style cites, mixed Latin and Greek text, annotated bibliographies).

IBM Selectrics had a symbol ball [𝛼] you could swap for the standard one. It only takes a few seconds to change balls, though when I've seen people doing it they would normally type all the prose on a page, then go back and type all the math. Super/subscripts were done by rolling the paper up and down half a line. The big symbols like the square root were done later with pen and a ruler. Working from a handwritten manuscript, of course.

[𝛼] https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...

There were some interesting Selectric balls, e.g. one specifically for writing APL! One of my CS professors wrote his dissertation on something to do with APL and had a copy of the manuscript and an APL type ball that he liked to show off.

The Selectric came out in 1961, after this paper.

I was wondering the same, until I realised that typewriters were presumably also sold in Greece.

We had an amazing technical secretary in our Stanford research group (spouse of a Nobel Prize winner). She quickly visualize the order of symbols on the IBM Selectric math ball and typed the equations flawlessly. Then laser printers became affordable in 1980 with various UNIX equation hacks. Until Knuths magnus opus TeX.

In addition to Selectric symbol balls, you could use a "normal" typewriter with a set of extra symbols on tiny plastic sticks. You would place the symbol head on the stick in the way of the typewriter's strike.

I found a Math Overflow thread full of stories about this: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19930/writing-papers-in-p...

And see page 7 of this for pictures: https://etconline.org/backissues/ETC099.pdf

Indeed, pre-TeX, Phyllis Winkler prepared all of Knuth's papers using TYPIT sticks for all the math symbols. Unfortunately, I didn't nab her typewriter and TYPIT box after her retirement, but here's a good set of photos and explanation: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/1098850604640755712?lang...

Also, a TYPIT advertisement on the bottom left of the third page of https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6500767

There were typewriters with math symbols:

https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/products/hermes-3000...

Notably, Dijkstra used a modified Hermes with a mixture of different type bars to get the output he wanted in his earlier EWDs.

I liked this film dramatization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

“Actual” is such a weird word. From the title it sounds like it is going to contrast what people think is this person's work with what they actually did. Maybe to make a point that they did less work themselves than people assume or think. But it seems that “actual” in this case means that they wrote down the calculations on the paper that the video author has in their hands. (I'm gonna assume that this is the original pamphlet and not a copy, of course.)

I think the "actual" here means something like "in contrast to the movie Hidden Figures, which gives only a superficial view of what Katherine Johnson actually did". So instead of a few minutes in a movie with some equations scribbled on a blackboard, this is the actual work in context.

Thanks. That makes sense.

I think it makes it sound cool, like this is ACTUALLY her work, awesome!

We've actually taken it out of the title above now.

This work was done by a team of people. This is commonly misattributed to a single person.

What are you referencing? The paper in the video has two authors. Johnson's name wasn't going to be on it. Initially, it was going to be misattributed to one person who was not Johnson.

Out of curiousity, have you looked at the paper or read the Forbes article linked in one of the other top-level comments? (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/08/30/katherine...)

The paper itself has only two listed authors - that's also visible in the linked YouTube video and in the paper itself here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980227091

Further, the Forbes article has a quote from the paper's other author:

> [the other author] told [their boss], 'Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway.'

With that in mind, I don't think it's a stretch to refer to this as her calculations, even though I'm sure Ted Skopinski (the other author) made significant contributions as well.

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