KGOU produces journalism in the public interest, essential to an informed electorate. His handwriting is all over a chalkboard in an early scene as a young Katherine Johnson solves a quadratic equation. Horne doesn’t make an appearance in the film. If it gets more people involved in math and science and STEM fields, that's a great thing.” “If the film does that, if it helps get more women in science, it gets more African Americans, or for that matter more people - whether an African-American, white, Hispanic whatever. “I had a student here at Morehouse who came up to me and mentioned that after he had seen the film it really inspired him to want to do mathematics,” Horne said. He went on to get his PhD and now teaches at Morehouse College in Atlanta.Īs a mathematician and an African American, he says it’s heartwarming to see these women receive recognition on the big screen, and he’s proud to have played a part in it. In high school, he figured out that he really liked calculus, and then he studied at the University of Oklahoma between 19, double-majoring in math and physics. Rudy Horne grew up on the south side of Chicago. “After I heard their history and then I went online and looked for more information for myself, I felt kind of ashamed that I didn't know these people were, especially myself being African-American,” Horne said. When the movie studio approached Horne to work on a movie about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, he had never heard of the three women. “I definitely tried to convey that sense to the people on the set.” A lot of times you're working on a problem, and you're kind of relying on faith that you will find a solution. “As a mathematician, trust me, I'm very happy when certain problems work out. It’s one of the things Horne wanted to get across to the movie makers. In many scenes, characters show a sense of excitement about math. “I didn't expect him to, but he actually put that into the script.” “He really liked that concept,” Horne said. He helped director Theodore Melfi settle on using Euler’s method to solve a particular problem in a scene in which Johnson figures out how to calculate the trajectory to bring John Glenn back to earth. Horne played a small role in shaping the script. “My other task was primarily to check that the mathematics on the blackboards in the background scenes and in note books was consistent with the things that NASA did at the time.” “Any math that she wrote on the board, I was responsible for training her to write said math on the board,” Horne said. He encouraged her to think of the equations - both written and spoken - like memorizing lines in a script. He worked with the film’s stars, especially Henson, on learning pieces of equations. To make sure the movie’s math adds up, 20th Century Fox hired Morehouse College applied mathematics professor and University of Oklahoma graduate Rudy Horne.
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