Katherine Johnson

DOB: 26th August 1918, West Virginia USA DOD: 24th February 2020, Virginia USA

Known for: Mathematician who helped NASA get the first men into space

Katherine showed brilliance and curiosity with numbers from a young age, attended High school at only 10 years old. She then attended West Virginia State College and graduated at the age of 18, with a degree in Mathematics and French. She would become one of the first three African American to enroll at West Virginia University. This is even more impressive when you consider that a lot of African-American schools didn’t go past 8^th grade (year 9) especially in Katherine’s home town White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

West Virginia is considered a southern state in America and at that time coloured people experienced a lot of racism; from not being able to attend the same places as white people to not being able to share the same toilet or even coffee pot, this was known as segregation. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a segregated company until it developed into National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which banned segregation.

Katherine was hired with other African-American women to perform difficult calculations for engineers, they were the first computers. She helped create calculations required for spaceflights to make it in to orbit. This included the path of Freedom 7 (piloted by Alan Shepard) which became the first American manned space flight. John Glenn himself requested Katherine to look over the calculations before he became the first American to orbit the earth, he is quoted as saying “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go” to her supervisor. She would go one to create calculations for the moon landing (Apollo11), NASA’s “Successful failure” (Apollo 13) and space shuttle missions before retiring as one of the most respected people in NASA mainly because of her accuracy and professionalism during the early space race. NASA is quoted "Her calculations proved as critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program and the start of the Space Shuttle program, as they did to those first steps on the country's journey into space.”

Katherine’s father, Joshua Colman thought Katherine showed such promise when young that he sold the family farm and moved the entire (Katherine’s mother, Joylette and three older siblings Horace, Charles and Margaret) family to Institute, West Virginia. Institute had many more educational opportunities that White Sulphur Spring including African-American high schools and Colleges. Katherine would say in later life that she was a daddy’s girls and something he would always say helped shape her own attitude especially in regards to segregation, he would say “you are as good as anyone in this town but you’re no better”. Joshua would commute back to White Sulphur Springs over 130 miles away to work at a hotel every week day.

Katherine would marry a man called James Francis Goble in 1939 aged 21 and would have three daughters: Joylette, Katherine and Constance. All three of their daughter would become mathematicians and teacher. He would die in 1956 from an inoperable brain tumour. In 1959, Katherine would marry James Johnson, a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army and veteran of the Korean War. They had met through the Presbyterian Church where Katherine was a member of the choir.

On 16^th November 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedon by President Barack Obama, the highest award that a civilian can be given. Katherine is only the second woman to be awarded this medal for services to space exploration after Sally Ride (the first American woman in space). Other members of NASA include all three members of the Apollo 11 mission and Apollo 13 mission, along with 10 members of Apollo 13’s operations team, and John Glenn himself.

In May 2016 NASA named a new building at Langley Research Centre (where Katherine had worked) the ‘Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility’. When Katherine was not receiving these honours as marks of respects for the work she did, including the walls she knocked down for women and people of colour, she enjoyed playing bridge and puzzle solving but enjoyed talking to students about her work and inspiring others. Katherine was so humble about her history that even her Granddaughter didn’t know the full extent of her Grandmother’s story until recently, as Katherine has said “All [she] did was go to work and [do her] job.”

Quotes from Katherine Johnson

“Everything is either Physics or Maths”
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better”
“Like what you do, an then you will do your best”
“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics”

“Our teachers made such a difference – all my teachers and professors were very supportive and nurturing”
“I like to learn. That’s an art and a science”

Learn more about Katherine in
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race	Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi)	Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson
A Book by Margot Lee Shetterly that first drew attention to Katherine Johnson’s story along with other coloured women who worked at NASA at the time and tells their amazing stories	A film based on the book that tells the story of Katherine and her colleagues Mary Jackson, an aspiring engineer and their supervisor Dorothy Vaughan who would become the head of programming.	Due for release in September 2019. Katherine tells her own story especially for students and young reader everywhere to be inspired.