![]() ![]() “I loved to learn so much that going to school alone wasn’t enough.”īy age 10, Johnson was in high school. They followed me everywhere … that was just the way my mind worked,” she wrote in her 2019 autobiography, Reaching for the Moon. ![]() By age four, she could spell and multiply, and she counted everything she could quantify. Women could not vote, and racial discrimination was legal, systemic, and rampant.Īs a child, Johnson displayed a natural aptitude for learning. World War I raged on, Woodrow Wilson was in his second term as president of the United States, and the Cold War-fueled space race was still decades away. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918. “I truly loved going to work every single day.” A lifelong passion for numbers “Quietly the quality of my contribution began to outweigh the arbitrary laws of racial segregation and the dictates that held back my gender,” Johnson wrote of her early days working as a computer. Telling the story of NASA’s “computers”-the women who quite literally plotted and computed aeronautical and astronautical trajectories-the book and a subsequent Oscar-nominated movie launched Johnson into the international spotlight when she was in her mid-90s. But like the other black women who worked for NASA at the time, Johnson remained mostly unknown outside of the space agency-until 2016, when Margot Lee Shetterly published the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. Her exquisite facility with analytic geometry formed the foundation for NASA’s most daring space missions of the 1960s, including the first crewed flights to the moon. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach,” Barack Obama said when he awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.įor decades, Johnson, an African-American woman, was among NASA’s largely uncelebrated pioneers. Beyond helping the US go to the moon, Katherine has several honorary degrees, has co-authored many research papers, and is an excellent example of how wonderful our minds can be.Katherine Johnson, the stereotype-shattering mathematician whose calculations helped sling NASA astronauts into space, died February 24 at age 101. Today, Katherine lives in Hampton, Virginia, has six grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and loves to play piano and bridge. It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, with Katherine's massive intellect as part of the process along the way. In 1969, Katherine was also the one to calculate the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. ![]() In 1962, NASA used computers to chart John Glenn's orbit around earth, but NASA insisted on Katherine's personal verification of the math the computer came up with before allowing the John Glen to go up. In 1959, Katherine was the one to calculate the trajectory for Alan Shepard's flight, the first American in Space. Katherine was one of the few who actually had the right training and intellect, and became part of the Spacecraft Controls Branch. Katherine didn't just check the math, her math was the basis for spaceflights. Katherine would be key to NASA and the first US Space Flights! NASA then was specifically looking for African American women who would check the math and do calculations for engineers. But Katherine in 1953 really wanted to go back to work, and went to join the early iteration of NASA (then called NACA). Katherine became a teacher, one of the few career options for women then. ![]() She was one of the first African Americans to enroll, but could not complete due to family obligations. Graduating Summa Cum Laude (the highest honor) with two degrees in Math and French, Katherine enrolled in West Virginia University to earn an graduate degree in Math. In College, her favorite professor created a special course in Analytic Geometry just for her. Her parents moved her family 125 miles away from home in search of the education they knew she and her siblings needed, and Katherine lived up to that dream. A natural math genius and excellent student, Katherine started school in the 2nd grade (not kindergarten), and graduated High School at 14 years of age. Katherine Johnson, born Augin White Sulphur Springs West Virginia, helped the United States go to the moon. ![]()
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