The Economist February 29th 2020
Katherine Goble Johnson, NASA mathematician, died on February 24th, aged 101

Katherine Goble Johnson，NASA数学家，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. But there were other, more significant snags than simply being new.

当Katherine Goble扫过工程师递给她的飞行计算结果的时候，一下就看出了上面的错误。工程师在计算平方根的时候犯了一个错误，而告知他会显得很棘手。她和另外一个女孩从Langley的航空实验室的计算区挑选出来，这里后来是NASA的一部分。今天正是她第一天接手这个工作，来帮助全部由男性负责的飞行研究单元。但是真正的阻碍，并非只是作为一个新人这么简单。

sheets指的是计算表格，Flight Research Unit：飞行研究部门

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.

很显然，他是一个男性，而她，是一个女性。1953年，女性向男性询问是被禁止的。她们只能呆在属于她们的地方，对于她们，指的是计算区，她们不是在敲计算器就是在填表格，而她总是能呈现出最简洁的结果。男人们，是伟大的设计家，是工程师；而女人们，捧着一堆等式，兢兢业业、勤勤恳恳，却只是穿着一帘裙子的计算器。男人们对这种小事根本不屑一顾。

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. There was no Coloured restroom, so she used the White one. A few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the state line from West Virginia, all the blacks had been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until she was asked nicely.
But it could be unwise to push a white man too far.

真正棘手的问题在于，她是黑人。虽然实验室会招募黑人数学家，但是青睐的大门并非完全敞开。她所在的计算区被称为“黑人计算区”，和其他计算区是分开的。就在她来到新组的那天早上，她邻座的男人就搬走了。她还不能完全肯定，但是世界就是这样，对此她置若罔闻。由于这里的咖啡也是分开供应的，所以她只能在她的办公桌上享用。同样，这里也没有设置有色人种的卫生间，所以她使用白人的卫生间。就在几年前，她坐汽车去接她的第一份教学工作。从西弗吉尼亚州的州际线时，所有的黑人被要求下车改乘计程车。她拒绝了这种无理要求，直到善意待之。但是，面对白人时寸步不让是不明智的。

Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an aircraft might not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible that he could have made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of a cough drop, he ceded the point.

虽然如此，开始提到的这个工程师，他的计算是错误的。如果她不过问，航天器就飞不起来，或者即使飞起来了，但最后也会坠毁。所以，她小心翼翼地提出了她的疑问，有没有可能是他犯了一个错误？面露难色，他没有承认自己的错误，但还是放弃了自己的观点。

She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the men “forgot” to return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work sharper.It also challenged them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so often out? Because they were maths graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths had led to special classes on analytic geometry in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was she not allowed to get her name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work, filling her data sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got her name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. Why was she not allowed into the engineers’ lectures on orbital mechanics and rocket propulsion? Because “the girls don’t go”. Why? Did she not read Aviation Week, like them? She soon became the first woman there.

她问了像很多这样的问题，它们引起了她的注意。几周过去了，这些男人显然并不是忘了把她送还到属于她的计算区。她接二连三的追问，使得他们的工作路线变得有条不紊。这，同样也是在挑战他们。为什么，他们的空气动力学的计算结果总是出错？因为他们肄业于数学系，几何学早已遗忘，而她却相反。当她还是一个13岁的小孩子时，就已经表现出了优秀的数理能力，她得以参加了解析几何的特殊课程。多少个日日夜夜身陷数字和图表之中，以一人之力完成了绝大部分飞行轨迹的结果，那为什么她不能用署上自己的名字呢？因为，女人不能，却没人能够回答为什么，她最后签上了自己的名字，这也是有史以来第一个女人完成的记录。又为何她被禁止参加轨道力学和火箭推进相关的工程师课程？就因为“女人不能”。以及被问及她是否像他们一样读过《航空周刊》的读物。困难不断，但很快她成了他们中的第一个女性工程师。

to be so credited 指的是获得认可
Did she not 是反问，这个犯了低级错误，意为：难道她不是像他们一样读《航空周刊》吗？

As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved, though still behind the scenes. This excited her, because if her first love was mathematics—counting everything as a child, from plates to silverware to the number of steps to the church—her second was astronomy, and the uncountable stars. A celestial globe now joined the calculator on her desk. She had to plot the trajectories of spacecraft, developing the launch window and making sure—as soon as humans took off—that the module could get back safely. This involved dozens of equations to calculate, at each moment, which bit of Earth the spacecraft was passing over, making allowances for the tilt of the craft and the rotation of the planet. She ensured that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule splashed down where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn in 1962 could return safely from his first orbits of the Earth. Indeed, until “the girl”, as he called her (she was 43), had checked the figures by hand against those of the newfangled electronic computer, he refused to go.

当NASA把重点从超音速飞机转向航天飞船的研究，虽然她仍然在幕后，但是她起的作用却很大。这项工作使得她激情澎湃，如果说，她的初恋是数学——像小孩子一样细数家珍，从盘子数到餐具数，再到教堂的台阶一梯一梯；那么，她的第二位恋人就是天文，是天空群星无尽。而现在，一颗来自天空的小球就这样进入了她的计算结果。她必须绘制出飞行的轨迹，设计出发射舱，确保一旦宇航员起飞，发射舱能保证他们能够平安返航。而这涉及了大量的数学计算，航天飞船经过地球的每一个位置、每一个瞬间，她都必须考虑飞船的倾斜和地球的自转。正是她，于1961年，保证了Alan Shepard^[1]的水星号飞船^[2]的落点得以被快速搜索；1962年，John Glenn^[3]得以安全返回第一轨道。诚然，这个被他称为“女孩”的人（当时她已经43岁），放弃了使用这些新式的计算机并亲自动手检查了结果，否则他拒绝前往。

celestial globe是天文仪，意为“除了计算器又多了天文仪”

That checking took her a day and a half. Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return), and worked on the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

检查工作耗费了她一天半的时间。此后，她又计算了首次登月的时间（包括了返舱），并在航天飞船上进行工作。她还设计了一套方法，通过对某个天体的观测，与星图进行对比来告知他们的位置。在这个群星闪耀，人才辈出的航天英雄中，虽然，33年来她都供职于航天研究组，但在相当长一段时间，她的工作都毫不逊色。

return 指的是返程
she featured nowhere 指的是“未获得属于自己的一席之地”

It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters, cook, sew their clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind how good she was—as good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had graduated from high school at 14 and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her. But she typically credited the help of other people, especially her father, the smartest man she knew, a farmer and a logger, who could look at any tree and tell how many board-feet he could get out of it; and who had sold the farm and moved the family so that she and her siblings could all get a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not worked alone. She had been one of around a dozen black women mathematicians who were equally unknown. But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called “Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doctorates and—the greatest thrill—a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

但这也没有难倒她。一方面，她还有其他的考虑：养育她的三个女儿，做饭，并为她们缝补衣服以及照顾她的第一任丈夫。另一方面，她同时也知道自己多么优秀——不逊色于任何人。她很清楚，她14岁中学毕业，18岁大学毕业。她精通数学的各个领域，任何人教她都是一点就通。她总是能记住别人的优点，特别是她的父亲，一个农民同时也是伐木工，那是她认为最聪明的人，一个总是有先见，而且知道如何实现它们的人。为了使自己的女儿们受到更好的教育进入大学，他卖掉了农场，举家搬迁^[4]。
最终，在NASA，她不再孤军奋战。她成为了这些默默无闻的女科学家之一。半个世纪过去了，她们的故事进入了人们的视野，最有名的书和电影来自一部《隐藏人物》的作品，而以她的名字命名的建筑^[5]，也拥有了一大批荣誉博士——但最大的惊喜莫过于，她96岁时，奥巴马献给她的一吻，并以总统和平勋章向她致敬^[6]。

expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her这里也犯了一处错误，精通于..任何懂得教授她数学的人是定语从句，不是并列，意为“任何知道该如何教她数学的人教给她的数学知识她都完美掌握”
credited 得益于，纳入，第二次犯错了。
how many board-feet he could get out of it 中board-feet指的是板材，无论是哪一棵树，他只要看看就能知道能做出多少英尺的板材，get out of it 有挖的感觉

This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.

她对工作的专注度令人惊讶，而对于她而言，工作本身就是对自己的恩赐。她只是在做自己的工作，享受当下，而无关于作为女人和有色人种的抗争，她对此不屑一顾。她总是说，竭尽全力，爱你所做，永葆好奇心；她常说，开口提问的人是智慧的，不提问的人才是愚蠢的。更为重要的是，每一个小的疑问都可能蕴藏着巨大的胜利，他会使那些自以为聪明人意识到自己的错误。

And learn that it is not dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it.一个更好的翻译：问者不愚，愚者不问。
self-proclaimed superior 自恃高人一等

1. Alan Shepard，美国宇航员，1961年5月5日乘坐“自由7号”宇宙飞船遨游太空，是美国第一位进入太空的宇航员。 ↩

2. Mercury 是水星号飞船美国第一个载人飞船系列，从1961年5月-1963年5月美国共发射6艘“水星”号飞船，目的是试验飞船各种工程系统的性能，考察失重环境对人体的影响。 ↩

3. John Glenn，第一个绕行地球的美国人。https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-is-john-glenn-k4.html ↩

4. 接纳非洲裔学生的学校往往只开课到八年级，在那个年代只有极少数的非裔美国人能接受教育。 ↩

5. 2016年，NASA将兰利研究中心的计算大楼命名为凯瑟琳·G·约翰逊计算大楼 ↩

6. 2015年11月24日，奥巴马授予凯瑟琳·约翰逊美国总统自由勋章，为表彰她数年来对航空航天事业的巨大贡献。 ↩