Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician behind early spaceflights

Photo: Adam Cuerden, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Katherine Coleman was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918. She was so quick at math that she started high school at 10 and graduated from West Virginia State College at 18.

Langley

In 1953 she joined the West Area Computing unit at the Langley laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, part of NACA, which became NASA in 1958. The unit was a segregated group of Black women mathematicians.

She moved to the flight research division and worked on trajectory analysis.

Human spaceflight

Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s flight in 1961, the first American in space. In 1962, before John Glenn’s orbital flight, he asked that she personally check the numbers produced by the new electronic computers.

She later worked on calculations for the Apollo program, including the 1969 moon landing, and on the space shuttle.

Recognition

She retired in 1986. In 2015 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The 2016 book and film “Hidden Figures” brought her story to a wide audience. She died in 2020 at 101.