Please advise this woman to go watch the movie 'Hidden Figures' about the two FEMALE and BLACK mathematicians who put the early NASA right when it came to correctly calculating orbital figures, thus enabling NASA to eventually put men on the moon

Read -

On November 24, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, considered the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 17 men and women. Among them was 97-year-old retired African-American NASA mathematician Katherine G. Johnson, selected for her contributions to the space program, starting with the Mercury missions in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, through the Apollo moon missions in the late ’60s and early ‘70s, and ending with the space shuttle missions in the mid '80s. Among other things, she calculated the trajectories of America's first manned mission into orbit and the first Moon landing.

Awarding Johnson this well-deserved honor doesn't just shine a spotlight on a single black female STEM pioneer. It also illuminates an obscure but important piece of history. Johnson was just one of dozens of mathematically talented black women recruited to work as “human computers” at the Langley Memorial Research Laboratory in the ‘40s and ‘50s. (Many of whom, including Johnson, are the subject of Theodore Melfi's Oscar-nominated film, Hidden Figures.)

tac

The left has so diluted the terms "White Privilege" and "Racist/Racism" to the point that they are now meaningless. Before long, I'll be a racist because I like Honey Nut Cheerios and probably a misogynist to boot because they contain the word "Nut". Big bro has a Masters degree in Medical Physics; good God only knows the White Privilege of which he'll be accused...[not enough eye-rolls]

quote:

Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications.

Who are her peers?
Academics who sit around smoking dope and listening to rap music?
Obviously not physicists and engineers.

Hmm. I'da thunk that the ability to conjugate verbs and nouns would've been the white privilege kicker....

quote:

Originally posted by slabsides45:
Hmm. I'da thunk that the ability to conjugate verbs and nouns would've been the white privilege kicker....

To put a point on it, nouns are "declined", not "conjugated" (that's only for verbs). And in this case, "declined" doesn't mean "turned away".

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:


I also challenge her to explain this Member of the Royal Society.


Courtesy of Srinivasa Ramanujan, Mathematician

Don't construe this as defending the idiocy of this woman's statement, but that's not entirely what she said.

She said, in part, that the way we teach "math" is biased in a way that suggests it was all the handiwork of some Greeks and assorted later Europeans. That a guy from India used Newton's calculus to do something swell doesn't run counter to what she says, nor does the fact that there were a bunch of black mathematicians out there. All of them used "European" math.

Her agenda is utterly nonsensical and, I'd add, racist in and of itself, but what she says is not untrue: "the" math system today is essentially European (yes, with many of its bases rooted in non-Western maths) and is taught to the exclusion of other math systems which we know existed and were themselves very effective.

The rest of it about it perpetuating white privilege is utter nonsense. She's not wholly wrong in her premises, just everything else about her argument.