In the Book
In the Movie
Few details on the meetings Katherine attended and what she did there.
At the first meeting she attends, Katherine Johnson explains details of why the Mercury capsule needs to have the correct trajectory and shows the others her math on the board. John Glenn is attending and is impressed.
The female computors were renamed math aides after NASA was created from NACA.
Not addressed in the movie.
In September 1960 Katherine Johnson and Ted Skopinski published their Azimuth Angle report which was used to place a satellite over a selected Earth position.
Katherine is shown putting her name on a report along with another engineer. The engineer objected as computors never got credit for their work in reports at that time.
The book does not show the white supervisors having this kind of friction with the black women in East Area computing.
The day of Glenn's launch, Vivian sees Dorothy in the ladies room and says she never treated her differently because she's black. Dorothy doesn't believe her.
After Katherine Johnson finished her Azimuth Angle report in 1959 the numbers were checked by the IBM 704 and later checked by the 7090 for two different orbits, one launched east and the other west. It took her a day and a half; her numbers agreed with the IBM. Three days prior to his scheduled orbit in Friendship 7, John Glenn requested that someone verify the calculations made by the IBM 7090 computer. He requested “the girl”, meaning Katherine Johnson. He did not remember her name.
John Glenn makes the request for “the girl” to check the numbers just prior to lift-off.