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Katherine Goble Johnson, NASA mathematician, died on february 24th, aged 101
美國宇航局數學家凱瑟琳·戈布爾·約翰遜于2月24日逝世，享年101歲。
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.
當凱瑟琳·戈布爾瀏覽工程師給她的飛行測試計算表時，她(當時的她)發現計算表有問題。工程師犯了一個平方根的錯誤。要告訴他這一點是很棘手的。此前，她和另一個女孩從蘭利航空實驗室的計算員工中被挑選出來，這是她第一天參與這個任務，協助這個全部由男性構成的飛行研究單位的工作。該實驗室后來成為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.
但除了作為新員工，還有其他更重要的障礙。最明顯的是，工程師是男人，而她是女人。在1953年，女性不能質疑男性。女性呆在他們的地方，在這里通常是計算部門，在他們的門羅臺式計算器上敲來敲去，或者在表格上填上數字，凱瑟琳和其他人一樣熟練。男人是偉大的設計師，工程師；這些女人是“穿著裙子的計算機”，他們會拿到一組方程式，并竭盡全力地、勤勉地仔細檢查。男人對這么小的事情不感興趣。
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.
最艱難的是，凱瑟琳是有色人種，而這個工程師是白人。實驗室可能會招募黑人數學家，但是這扇門并沒有完全打開；她的部門被稱為“有色計算機部門”，并被隔離。那天早上，當凱瑟琳和新團隊坐在一起時，她旁邊的人已經搬走時了。她不知道為什么，但世界就是這樣，她拒絕被它困擾。由于咖啡館是種族隔離的，所以她在自己的辦公桌前吃飯。
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