Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician who worked for NASA. She lived from 1918 to 2020. Her calculations helped send the first American astronauts into space and to the Moon. For most of her career, almost no one outside NASA knew her name. Today she is one of the most famous mathematicians in American history.

Johnson was born in West Virginia in 1918. She was a math prodigy from the start. By age ten, she was ready for high school. By eighteen, she had finished college with top grades in math and French. At the time, very few Black women in America became professional mathematicians. Schools and most jobs were segregated by race, which means Black and white people were kept separate by law.

In 1953, Johnson was hired by a government agency that later became NASA. She joined a group of Black women mathematicians known as the "West Area Computers." Back then, the word "computer" meant a person who computed, not a machine. These women did the math that engineers needed, often by hand or with simple adding machines. They worked in a separate building and used separate bathrooms from the white workers.

Johnson's math skills set her apart quickly. She was assigned to the team planning America's first crewed space flights. In 1961, she calculated the path for Alan Shepard's flight, the first time an American went to space. The next year, John Glenn was about to orbit the Earth. Engineers had used new electronic computers to plan his flight, but Glenn did not fully trust the machines. He asked NASA to "get the girl" to check the numbers. He meant Johnson. She ran the math by hand, and the mission was a success.

Johnson kept working on bigger missions. She helped calculate the path that took Apollo 11 to the Moon and back in 1969. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and on early plans for a mission to Mars. She retired from NASA in 1986 after 33 years.

For decades, her story was barely told. That changed late in her life. In 2015, President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. The next year, the book and film Hidden Figures told the story of Johnson and her colleagues. NASA named two buildings after her. She died in 2020 at age 101. Today, kids who once never heard her name learn it in school.