![]() ![]() She was a mathematician and she worked for NASA. But up until a few years ago, hardly anyone had heard of her or her achievements. She married Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson in 1959.Katherine Johnson, who has died at the age of 101, was an amazing woman. Johnson and her first husband, James Goble, who died in 1956, had three daughters. Johnson made the transition to the computer era and worked on the shuttle programme while writing or co-writing 26 research reports before retiring in 1986, NASA said. She would go on to calculate crucial rocket trajectories, orbital paths and launch windows. Johnson found herself in a realm made up almost exclusively of white men when she was chosen to be part of the team supporting the 1961 mission that made Alan Shepard the first American in space. After teaching for seven years, Johnson went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a forerunner of NASA, in 1953. She zipped through the school’s math program, earning degrees in math and French before becoming one of the first black students in the graduate school at West Virginia University in 1938. Johnson’s math skills got her into West Virginia State College at age 15. ![]() But her mother, a former teacher, and her father, a farmer and handyman, stressed education and moved the family 120 miles to a town that had a high school for black children. Johnson grew up in West Virginia at a time when educational opportunities for black people were limited because of segregation. She wished it away, willed it out of existence inasmuch as her daily life was concerned.” “She knew just as well as any other black person the tax levied upon them because of their color. “She didn’t close her eyes to the racism that existed,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in Hidden Figures. “He knew I had done before for him and they trusted my work,” Johnson told the Washington Post in 2017.ĭuring the space race between the US and the former Soviet Union, Johnson and her co-workers ran the numbers for unmanned rocket launches, test flights and aeroplane safety studies using pencils, slide rules and mechanical calculating machines.īut they did their work in facilities separate from white workers and were required to use separate restrooms and dining facilities. Johnson worked on the Mercury and Apollo missions, including the first moon landing in 1969, and the early years of the space shuttle programme. Astronaut John Glenn thought so much of her that he insisted Johnson be consulted before his historic earth-orbiting flight in 1962. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he said. “She’s one of the greatest minds ever to grace our agency or our country,” then NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said when Johnson was presented with the honour. Johnson was also awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by former United States President Barack Obama in 2015. Johnson’s 33-year career with NASA was portrayed in the book Hidden Figures, which then went on to become an Oscar-nominated film. “She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. Katherine Johnson, the black woman whose mathematical genius took her from a behind-the-scenes job in a segregated NASA to a key role in sending humans to the moon, died on Monday at the age of 101, the space agency said.
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