With National Women’s Day fast approaching, I feel it is important to examine the contributions of some fantastic ladies who changed the game for women everywhere! One of these women is Katherine Johnson, the brilliant mathematician behind NASA from 1953-1988. Johnson was known for calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury—the first human spaceflight program of the United States running from 1958-1963. An early highlight of the space race, the goal was to put a man into Earth’s orbit and return him safely before the Soviet Union.
Johnson was known for working on trajectories for space flights of astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space and John Glenn, the first American in orbit. Her calculations were also monumental in starting the Space Shuttle Program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. During Johnson’s 35-year career at NASA, she earned a reputation for mastering complex calculations by hand and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform these calculations. The space agency noted her ‘historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist.”
Katherine Johnson was born Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was the youngest of four children. Her mother, Joylette Coleman, was a teacher, and her father, Joshua Coleman, was a handyman. Coleman showed an interest in mathematics at a very early age; because her county did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, her family arranged for her and her siblings to continue their education at a high school in Institute, West Virginia. Coleman graduated high school at the age of 14 and subsequently enrolled at West Virginia State, a historically black college.
As a student at West Virginia State, Coleman took every math class offered by the college. Coleman’s professors spoke very highly of her and even had to add new mathematics classes just for her. Coleman graduated summa cum laude (with the highest distinction) in 1937 with degrees in mathematics and French at age 18. Post-graduation, she took on a teaching job at a public school in Marion, Virginia. After marrying her first husband, James Goble, she quit her job and enrolled in a graduate math program at West Virginia University. She was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University; she was selected to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States supreme court ruling Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. She quit after just one year after becoming pregnant and choosing to focus on family.
After deciding on a career as a mathematician at a family gathering, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor, was hiring mathematicians. At the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory based in Hampton, Virginia, NACA hired African-American as well as white mathematicians for their Guidance and Navigation Department. Katherine Goble (later Katherine Johnson) accepted a job offer from the agency in June 1953.
In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures was released and told the stories of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Hensen), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) and how they were the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into Earth’s orbit.
Katherine Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 by President Barack Obama. She was also presented with the Silver Snoopy Award by NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin in 2016. Katherine Johnson died aged 101 on February 24, 2020, leaving behind an enormous legacy.