Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician, born in 1918 in West Virginia. Her mathematical abilities were clear from an early age as she began high school when she was only 10 years old. She would get her bachelors in mathematics and French when she was 18 years old from West Virginia State College. When she was 21 (1939) she was one of the first three African American students to enrol in her University's graduate program. While she was at university one of the professors, William Schieffelin Claytor, created a geometry class just for her and encouraged her to go into mathematical research. Claytor himself was the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics.

She dropped out of the graduate program and returned to teaching so that she could start a family with her then husband, James Goble. In 1952 a relative told her about open positions in the all-black Computing section at NACA. And in 1953 she began her work at the National Advisory for Aeronautics as a part of a group of African American women who manually solved complex mathematical problems. While she worked for NACA they had strict segregation policies however, this would change as in 1958 NACA became a part of NASA which banned segregation. While she was at NASA she worked on the calculations for space travel and coauthored or authored 26 research papers during her career.

During NASA's Mercury program (the first manned spaceflight program in the US) in the early 1960s her mathematical excellence was used to verify whether a computer had calculated a flight plan correctly. And, most importantly, she was on the team that calculated the timing and placement for the Apollo 11 mission which was the successful mission to put man on the moon. Johnson viewed her contributions to Apollo 11 as her greatest contribution to space exploration. She retired from NASA in 1986. Following her retirement she spent her time speaking to students about her career and encouraging people to pursue careers in STEM.

"Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away. There will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics. Everything is physics and math." -Katherine Johnson

In her lifetime she received many awards for her work including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. In 2015 a book about her life and the work of her other African American colleagues was published and in 2016 there was a film adaptation of said book. In 2019 she wrote her own book about her life for younger readers called "Reaching for the Moon". Sadly, Johnson died in 2020 at the impressive age of 101, the NASA official who announced her death promised that her legacy would not be forgotten.

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References:

• "Katherine Johnson Biography", by Margot Lee Shetterly, for NASA, accessed 30/1/21 https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

• "Katherine Johnson: Pioneering NASA mathematician" by Joana Stauss, on space.com , accessed 30/1/21, https://www.space.com/katherine-johnson.html

• Katherine Johnson, Britannica, accessed 30/1/21, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katherine-Johnson-mathematician