Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and recently passed on February 24, 2020. She was a mathematician for NASA.
Description, Artist, Date, Source
Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and recently passed on February 24, 2020. She was a mathematician for NASA.
Description, Artist, Date, Source
Her school life was not traditional, at age 10 she went to high school. The school she attended was West Virginia State High School. She graduated from high school at age 14. In 1932 she got her B.S. degree in French and Mathematics. For college, she attended West Virginia State University (formerly West Virginia State College) to get a graduate degree. She graduated with the highest honors by 1937. Her first job and the one she took after college was a teacher at a black public school.
Description, Artist, Date, Source
Around 1939, Johnson and two other black men were selected by Dr. John W. Davis, the state president of West Virginia to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school. They were the first African American students bestowed with the opportunity. Johnson left her teaching job and took up the opportunity, she enrolled into the math program. Although, Johnson did not complete the course. Instead, she and her first husband James Goble started a family.
She had three daughters, Joylette Goble, Constance Goble, and Katherine Goble., Artist, Date, Source
Katherine Johnson returned to her teaching job after her children got older. Until 1952, Johnson was told about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s, but now titled as NASA) Langley laboratory, headed by Dorothy Vaughan. Johnson decided to take on the opportunity, so she and her family moved to Newport News, Virginia. By 1953, she began working there. One of her first major projects was given to her within two weeks, a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division. Some other reports and projects Katherine contributed to were the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which is an artificial satellite about the size of a beach ball, some of the math of the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, which is America’s first human spaceflight, she co authored “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position” in 1960, and she helped with orbital mission of John Glenn in 1962. She retired in 1986.
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Katherine Johnson did work on an abundance of projects, but she also received some awards. In 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The NASA Group Achievement Award in 2016, and another one she received was the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019. In addition, the book “Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space” by Margot Lee Shetterly was written about African American women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, their work in NASA, and their impact on space exploration. A movie film called “Hidden Figures” was then based on the book.
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Katherine Johnson recieving NASA award,December 1, 2006, Source
Katherine Johnson and the actors in Hidden Figures, Brooke Marine, February 24, 2020,Source