The people behind the film

This paragraph explains who were the real heroes that Hidden Figures aimed at shedding light on.

The film focuses on three real-life African- American female pioneers: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were part of NASA's team of human “computers.” This was a group made up of mostly women who calculated by hand the complex equations that allowed space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn to travel safely to space. Through they ensured their stamp on American history — even if their story has remained obscured from public view until now.

This paragraph explains the role a math expert played in making Hidden Figures a realistic movie.

Horne's expert and affable work as the mathematics consultant on the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures helped make the possibilities and power of mathematics available to millions of people across the globe. [...] Over the 43 days of filming in Atlanta, Horne visited the set about a dozen times to work with the cast and crew. As Horne described it, “[a]ny math that she [Taraji P. Henson] wrote on the board, I was responsible for training her to write said math on the board. 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.” These “background scenes” included Horne's own handwriting. In one of the early scenes of the movie, a young Katherine Johnson [Lidya Jewett] factors a quadratic on a chalkboard. Horne actually did this calculation on the board. When working with Henson, Horne encouraged her to think of the mathematics she had to write and speak in the movie as lines in a script.

In this paragraph, the plausibility of some passages of the film is questioned.

Bill Barry has loved outer space since he was four years old. Years later, Barry became an Air Force pilot. Then in 2001, he joined NASA, and for the past seven years has served as the space agency's chief historian, based in Washington, D.C.

Barry has provided feedback for movies and TV shows before. But, he notes, this was never to the extent he did on Hidden Figures. His main job was to review the script and point out inaccuracies¹, or lines that a NASA person would never say. He was brought in after the script was written. Still, he notes, the filmmakers were willing to revise the script “to reflect things that should or shouldn't be in it.”

But the filmmakers did not always heed² his advice. “There's a scene where Mary Jackson walks through the wind tunnel,” he notes. Along the way, she gets one of her high heels stuck. “People don't walk through a wind tunnel at NASA,” Barry told them. But Ted Melfi chose to keep this scene anyway. He liked its dramatic touch.