经济学人下载:数学家凯瑟琳·戈布尔·约翰逊(1)

Katherine Goble Johnson, NASA mathematician, died on february 24th, aged 101 

美国宇航局数学家凯瑟琳·戈布尔·约翰逊于2月24日逝世，享年101岁。

As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, katherine Goble (as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer had made an error with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so. It was her first day on this assignment, when she and another girl had been picked out of the computing pool at the langley aeronautical laboratory, later part of NASA, to help the all-male flight research unit. 

当凯瑟琳·戈布尔浏览工程师给她的飞行测试计算表时，她(当时的她)发现计算表有问题。工程师犯了一个平方根的错误。要告诉他这一点是很棘手的。此前，她和另一个女孩从兰利航空实验室的计算员工中被挑选出来，这是她第一天参与这个任务，协助这个全部由男性构成的飞行研究单位的工作。该实验室后来成为NASA的一部分。

But there were other, more significant snags than simply being new. Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men. They stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on their monroe desktop calculators or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as all the rest. Men were the grand designers, the engineers; the women were "computers in skirts", who were handed a set of equations and exhaustively, diligently checked them. Men were not interested in things as small as that. 

但除了作为新员工，还有其他更重要的障碍。最明显的是，工程师是男人，而她是女人。在1953年，女性不能质疑男性。女性呆在他们的地方，在这里通常是计算部门，在他们的门罗台式计算器上敲来敲去，或者在表格上填上数字，凯瑟琳和其他人一样熟练。男人是伟大的设计师，工程师；这些女人是“穿着裙子的计算机”，他们会拿到一组方程式，并竭尽全力地、勤勉地仔细检查。男人对这么小的事情不感兴趣。

And, most difficult of all, she was coloured, and he was white. The lab might be recruiting black mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called "coloured computing", and was segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning, the men next to her had moved away. She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it. Since the café was segregated, she ate at her desk. 

最艰难的是，凯瑟琳是有色人种，而这个工程师是白人。实验室可能会招募黑人数学家，但是这扇门并没有完全打开；她的部门被称为“有色计算机部门”，并被隔离。那天早上，当凯瑟琳和新团队坐在一起时，她旁边的人已经搬走时了。她不知道为什么，但世界就是这样，她拒绝被它困扰。由于咖啡馆是种族隔离的，所以她在自己的办公桌前吃饭。