Katherine Johnson

Creola Katherine Coleman was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her mother, Joylette, had been a teacher. Her father, Joshua, worked at a hotel and ran a farm and could calculate the board feet in a standing tree by eye. Katherine was the youngest of four. She counted everything. She counted the steps to the road, the stars she could see from the porch, the words on the page, the dishes as she washed them. By the age of ten she had outrun the local school.

Greenbrier County did not operate a high school for Black children past the eighth grade. Joshua Coleman moved the family 120 miles each fall to Institute, West Virginia so his children could attend the laboratory high school at West Virginia State College, then one of only a handful of historically Black colleges operating a K-through-college campus. Katherine enrolled in the college itself at fifteen.

At West Virginia State she attracted the notice of W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third Black American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Claytor designed advanced courses for her alone: analytic geometry of space, then a course on the mathematics of curved surfaces that was not on the catalog. "You would make a good research mathematician," he told her. "I will see to it that you are prepared." She graduated summa cum laude at eighteen with degrees in mathematics and French.

She married James Goble, taught high-school mathematics in Virginia and West Virginia, and raised three daughters. In 1940 she and two other Black students were handpicked by West Virginia Governor Homer Holt to integrate the graduate program at West Virginia University. She withdrew before finishing the program. Her first husband's health was failing. She returned to teaching to support the family. Goble died of a brain tumor in 1956.

In 1952 a relative told her the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was hiring Black women for its computing pool at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. She applied and was hired in 1953. She went to work in the West Area Computing section, the segregated "colored computers" office where the Black women mathematicians worked apart from the white women's pool for the first years of her career.

Langley's West Area Computing section was run by Dorothy Vaughan, the first Black supervisor in the agency's history. Vaughan assigned Katherine Goble to the flight research division after two weeks. Two weeks was a long time in West Computing, which lent its mathematicians to other divisions like library books. The flight research group kept her. She sat in on the engineers' briefings, asked questions the men had not thought to ask, and began writing the mathematics of spacecraft reentry in longhand on sheets of graph paper.

In 1958 NACA became NASA. The agency's Space Task Group absorbed her. She wrote or co-wrote 26 technical reports over the next two decades, on the geometry of orbital flight, the reentry corridor that would bring an Apollo capsule home from the moon, the timing of a rocket's retro-burn to drop a spacecraft into a specific Atlantic Ocean splashdown zone. The 1960 report "Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position," coauthored with engineer Ted Skopinski, was the first report from the Space Task Group to list a woman as an author. She had to insist on the credit. She told them she had done the work.

In 1961 she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight, the first American human spaceflight. Shepard went up and down in a 15-minute suborbital arc. The next year NASA prepared to put John Glenn into orbit. The trajectory was now handled by an IBM 7090 electronic computer. The machines were new. They failed often. Glenn did not trust them. He asked the flight director to have "the girl" recheck the numbers by hand. "If she says they're good," he said, "I'm ready to go." She worked the calculations on a desk adding machine over a day and a half. Friendship 7 launched on February 20, 1962 and circled Earth three times.

She remarried in 1959 to James A. Johnson, a Korean War Army veteran. From that year forward her published papers carried the name Katherine Johnson. She went on to compute the rendezvous mathematics for the Apollo Lunar Module's return from the surface of the moon to the Command Module in lunar orbit. The math had to work within seconds. A miss meant a crew stranded on the moon. It did not miss. She then worked on the Space Shuttle program and on the early Earth Resources Satellite. She retired from NASA in 1986, after 33 years.

For a long time almost no one outside her section knew her name. Her work appeared in NASA technical reports filed under male engineers' names. The colored bathroom at her first building at Langley was half a mile from her desk. She later said she ignored the sign, used the nearest bathroom, and nobody ever stopped her. When Margot Lee Shetterly, a Langley engineer's daughter, began to research the history of the West Computing women in the 2010s, Johnson was still alive and still sharp. Shetterly interviewed her at length.

Hidden Figures, Shetterly's 2016 book and the film adapted from it that same year, put Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson in front of a world audience for the first time. Johnson was 98. Earlier that year she had already received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony, standing with President Barack Obama in her wheelchair and smiling at the camera as the citation was read.

Langley dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility in 2017. She cut the ribbon in a red coat at the age of 99. In 2019 she received the Congressional Gold Medal, one of four West Computing mathematicians to receive it. She died on February 24, 2020 at a retirement home in Newport News, Virginia, at the age of 101.