![]() But soon after she got pregnant and decided to stop studying to raise her daughter. After getting married in 1939, she quit her job and enrolled in grad school to study maths. She ended up taking a teaching job at a public high school. She graduated summa cum laude in Maths and French at 18 years old.ĭespite being a mathematical genius, as a woman of colour in a segregated society Johnson had limited career opportunities. In college, she started studying French and English but a professor encouraged her to study maths instead. ![]() By age 10, Johnson was already in high school. She started elementary school at the age of 5 but had to be moved into more advanced classes twice. Johnson’s remarkable intelligence became apparent at a young age. Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) was well-known for her aeronautics work at NASA, where she developed calculations that helped the US launch its first astronaut into space in 1961 and safely land Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, among other pioneering crewed space missions. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.” Katherine Johnson She has received many honors for her work with NASA, including the National Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Barack Obama, in 2015.“Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. The book inspired an Oscar-nominated film of the same name released in 2016. Katherine Johnson is often seen as one of the most significant figures to represent women in science and technology and was one of the women profiled in the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. She remained with NASA through 1986, working on the space shuttle and Earth Resource Satellite programs. ![]() She also provided equations that turned out to be essential to the survival of the Apollo 13 mission after it was forced to abort. Johnson helped calculate the trajectory for the Apollo 11 mission that delivered the first humans to the lunar surface. After her confirmation, Glenn said “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” Using a desktop mechanical calculator, Johnson confirmed the numbers from the computer. Glenn specifically asked for Johnson to perform the calculations that had been run on the computers. ![]() Glenn and some of the other astronauts were wary of entrusting their lives to equations run on electronic computers. In 1962 Johnson famously calculated the trajectory for the Friendship 7 orbital flight of John Glenn. In 1961 she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Earth orbital mission. In 1960 she coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, an important report that laid out the equations for determining landing position for orbital spaceflight. NACA was renamed National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) in 1958, and Johnson became an aerospace technologist within NASA’s Spacecraft Controls branch. Johnson referred to the group as “computers who wore skirts.” Her advanced understanding of analytical geometry led to her assignment at the Maneuver Loads branch of the Flight Research Division of NACA. Initially, Katherine was part of an all-woman team that performed mathematical analysis on data collected from flight tests and the black boxes of airplanes. Johnson still wanted to pursue a career in mathematics, and in 1953 she secured a job at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. She left the program after a year to start a family, eventually raising three daughters. After marrying in 1939, she left teaching and enrolled at West Virginia University, the first African-American woman to enroll at the graduate level at the university. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937 with degrees in both mathematics and French.įollowing her graduation, Johnson began teaching at a public school in Marion, Virginia. She mastered every mathematics course offered at the college and several specialty courses were added specifically for her. Following her graduation at age 14, she enrolled at West Virginia State College, a historically black university in Institute, West Virginia. From a young age, she exhibited a remarkable talent for mathematics and skipped several grades in school, beginning high school at only 10 years old. Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918.
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