![]() She was a maestro of trajectories, NASA’s go-to mathematician for developing the equations of the country’s first ventures into space and, as could be expected, she showed genius from the start. August 26, 1918), who refused to be domineered by tradition and who, as a result, over thirty three years at NACA and NASA, made fundamental contributions to the Mercury and Apollo missions, the space shuttle, the mathematics of space flight, astronaut emergency navigation systems, satellite tracking techniques, and plans for a future Mars mission. And in a room separate even from those women was the place where the African American calculators were kept, segregated because of their race, and given brute force computational tasks because of their gender.Īll the externals spoke against sustained success for any non-white female mathematician and yet, from within that segregated room there came one person, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (b. Those calculations were handled by a small army of women who were “checked out” and “returned” to the mathematical pool as needed by the male scientists. Calculations, done almost entirely by hand, were the coursing lifeblood of the organization. And they said, 'Well, the girls don't usually go.' and I said, 'Well, is there a law?' They said, 'No.' So then my boss said, 'Let her go.Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as much as they could about the science of flight. As Johnson told public television station WHRO in 2011, none of it held her back: "I just happened to be working with guys and when they had briefings, I asked permission to go. The women battled both racism and sexism. She was one of a handful of African American women hired to do computing in the guidance and navigation department at Langley's Research Center in Virginia. "Everybody there was doing research," she recalled in later years, "You had a mission and you worked on it." She initially became a teacher but, in 1953, took a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics - the agency that would become NASA. ![]() She graduated from high school at 14 and finished college with degrees in math and French from historically black West Virginia State College. ![]() As a young girl, she was fascinated by numbers and it was clear early on she was gifted. Johnson was born in West Virginia in 1918. "Her story and her grace continue to inspire the world." "The NASA family will never forget Katherine Johnson's courage and the milestones we could not have reached without her," Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. Her death was announced by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. She calculated the flight path for America's first crewed space mission and moon landing, and she was among the women profiled in the book and movie Hidden Figures. ![]() Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who was one of NASA's human "computers" and an unsung hero of the space agency's early days, died Monday. NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, pictured at the 2017 Academy Awards, was one of the women profiled in the book and film Hidden Figures.
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