Katherine Johnson is another of the people celebrated in the film Hidden Figures (2016). She had a long and illustrious career working for NASA as a computer, when mathematicians were known as computers. She also pioneered the use of computers as we know them today.
Born in 1918 as the youngest of four children, Katherine showed outstanding abilities in maths from a very young age. The county she was born in did not offer black students any education past eighth grade, so when she was ten, her parents enrolled her in a high school which involved splitting their year between two counties.
Katherine finished high school at fourteen, then went to university, graduating with degrees in mathematics and French at the age of eighteen.
To begin with, Katherine spent her time teaching, but she really wanted to be a research mathematician, and this was very difficult to get into as a woman. It was not until 1952 that she finally achieved her goal and started to work for the NASA predecessor, working in a pool of women before being temporarily assigned to the all-male flight research team, which is where she made such an impression that they did not return her to the pool.
Katherine worked as an aerospace technologist in the Spacecraft Controls Branch. Her calculations for the launch window and trajectory were used for Alan Shepard’s Mercury mission in 1961, the first American manned flight. By now electronic computers were being used at NASA and she encouraged their use, but she also made navigation charts for astronauts in case of computer failure. When NASA used computers to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth, Glenn refused to fly unless Johnson double checked and agreed the calculations.
Later, she worked on the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, the1970 Apollo 13 Moon mission, the Space Shuttle program, the Earth Resources Satellite, and on plans for a mission to Mars.
It was only really towards the end of her long life that Katherine received the recognition she deserved. She died in 2020 at the age of 101.
