Mary, Dorothy, Katherine, and scripture's hidden figures
Like the stories of African-American women mathematicians at NASA, our faith's heritage reminds us to look for the people behind the scenes.
At the end of the film Hidden Figures, I turned to my friend and said, "That's a part of history I never learned in school."
Many of us can claim the same lack of knowledge. What we know about NASA and the space program largely revolves around John Glenn's orbit of the earth and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Hidden Figures, which tells the story of three African-American women who worked as mathematicians at NASA in the 1960s, unveils what all took place on earth in order to put astronauts into space successfully and safely.
The women are Mary, Dorothy, and Katherine. They are brilliant, hard-working, and quick-witted. Katherine solves problems that take up a wall covered in chalkboard. Dorothy figures out how to operate this device called an "IBM," the great-grandmother of our laptop computers. Mary devises a plan to turn her engineering mind into an engineering degree, despite the rules of segregation.
