Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson calculated the flight trajectories for Alan Shepard's 1961 mission — the first American in space. She calculated the trajectory for John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962. Glenn, before he would get in the capsule, insisted that the electronic computer be verified by Katherine Johnson personally. She worked at NASA for 33 years and was not publicly credited. She was 97 years old when Hidden Figures was published and the country finally learned her name.
Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918. She was so mathematically gifted that her father drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia every school year so she could attend school beyond the eighth grade — the highest level available to Black children near their home.
She graduated from West Virginia State College at eighteen, summa cum laude, with degrees in mathematics and French. She was so exceptional that the college president personally asked her to be one of three Black students to integrate West Virginia University's graduate program — the first such integration in the state's history. She enrolled, started, and then left to start a family.
In 1953, she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — NACA, which would become NASA — as a "computer." That was a job title, not a machine. Human computers, many of them Black women working in a segregated division, performed the complex mathematical calculations that the engineers needed. Katherine Johnson was so good that she was quickly pulled from the "colored computing pool" and assigned directly to work with engineers on flight research.
She was not supposed to attend the briefings. Women didn't attend. She attended anyway and asked so many precise, useful questions that they stopped trying to keep her out.
She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 mission — the flight that made him the first American in space. She calculated the orbital trajectory for John Glenn's 1962 Friendship 7 mission. Glenn, famously, refused to get into the capsule until Katherine Johnson personally verified the electronic computer's numbers. "If she says they're good," he said, "then I'm ready to go."
She worked on the Apollo program. Her calculations were part of the mission that put humans on the moon in 1969.
She worked at NASA for 33 years. She retired in 1986. For most of that time, she was not publicly credited for her work. Her name appeared on one research report — an unusual acknowledgment for a woman or a Black employee at the time. Otherwise, the work was attributed to the program, the mission, the agency.
In 2016, Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures, a book about Johnson and her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. The film adaptation was released that December. Katherine Johnson was 98 years old. She attended the Academy Awards. She received a standing ovation.
She died on February 24, 2020 at 101 years old. NASA named a facility after her. The building where she worked for three decades is called the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility.
We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.Katherine Johnson
She performed calculations that sent Americans into space and kept them alive. Her work was essential to the space program for three decades. She was not publicly credited for most of that time. The acknowledgment she received in her final years was real and deserved — and also arrived 50 years late.
Katherine Johnson is not just a story about an exceptional mathematician. She is a story about what institutional racism costs everyone. For decades, the United States space program was powered in part by the mathematical genius of Black women working in a segregated building, using segregated bathrooms, eating in a segregated cafeteria — and not being credited in public documents.
The country almost lost that history entirely. It took a researcher, a book, and a film to bring it back. Her story is a reminder to ask who else is missing from the records — whose calculations, whose labor, whose genius has been absorbed into institutional credit and disappeared from the historical record.