Katherine Johnson and Euler's Method

Summary --- Katherine Johnson (NASA 1969)

• As told in the book (and movie) Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson led the team of African-American women who did the actual calculation of the necessary trajectory from the earth to the moon for the US Apollo space program.

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• They used Euler’s method to do this.

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• During the Apollo program, NASA introduced electronic computers, the room-sized IBM mainframes. Dorothy Vaughan, from Johnson’s group, taught her group the new programming language FORTRAN so they could operate these new computer-machines.