But I mean, not like Wilkins was such a monster. And she surely would have won the Nobel Prize, but you can't get the Nobel Prize posthumously, so it was given to the person who showed her photograph without her permission, to Maurice Wilkins. I think she might have been about 40 years old when she died. So it's quite terrible, really, that it was shown without her permission. And it gave Watson and Crick an essential clue that led them to the double helix. This is the famous photograph that was shown to Jim Watson without her permission by her lab director, a person named Maurice Wilkins. She made the most beautiful crystals of DNA that caused her to take this very famous X-ray diffraction picture that, for someone who is expert in this field, can recognize as revealing the helical structure of DNA. That's Rosalind Franklin, who helped us figure out the structure of DNA with her work in X-ray crystallography. Yes.Īnd someone who did not live as long, sadly, is this woman. You know she was unrecognized for so long for her contributions, but there's president- I'm getting choked up again- President Obama giving her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I tend to get choked up when I look at it. Actually, she worked for the organization before it was called NASA, and used an outgrowth of calculus that we would call "differential equations" to help design the trajectories that put the astronauts on the moon and brought them back safely. So that is Katherine Johnson, the star of Hidden Figures, when she was younger. You may- anyone know who I'm showing? Who's that on the left? Have you seen the movie Hidden Figures? Yes, you have. Let me just comment on those pictures up there. We wouldn't have sent astronauts to the moon or unraveled the structure of DNA. We wouldn't have radio, television, or microwave ovens. Without calculus, we wouldn't have so many things that have made the world modern. Let me begin by trying to make the case for why calculus matters. Well, I'm here to talk to you about calculus today, and here we go. ![]() Very encouraging to see such a nice turnout. SPEAKER: This is a production of Cornell University Library.
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