<em>Hidden Figures</em> and the Appeal of Math in an Age of Inequality

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” John Glenn says, in a pivotal scene in the wonderful film Hidden Figures. The soon-to-be-star-astronaut is on the ground at Cape Canaveral, clad in his gleaming spacesuit, the Friendship 7 capsule he will soon be piloting waiting for him to board it. Glenn is about to become the first American to orbit the Earth; in that, he is also about to put his life in the hands of NASA, the still-relatively-new American space agency. He would prefer that the numbers that will determine whether he survives the flight will, indeed, check out.

And so: They get the girl. The numbers check out. The rest is history.

Well, the rest is newly common history. , as its title suggests, is a movie that knows that humans’s capacity to remember our past is outmatched only by our capacity, is a work of history, and a collective biopic, and a beautifully rendered drama of the small-scale victories that lead to large-scale progress. It is also, however, a movie-long exploration of the ways that “checking the numbers” is, as a proposition, both complicated and saliently simple. On the one hand: Culture being what it is, and racism being what it is, even the straightforward making of calculations, in the America of the 1960s, was fraught. Even something as basic as math was once regarded as a privilege that could be practiced, at the highest levels, only by the white and the male.