Sometimes they have more imagination than men. Onscreen, Johnson was portrayed by Taraji P Henson.Īmong tributes on Monday, the science writer Maryam Zaringhalam posted a quote by Johnson: “Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. She joined Naca in 1952 but with fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Dr Christine Darden, her story of overcoming racial and gender-based discrimination to become an integral part of Nasa’s work in space exploration was largely overlooked until the release of Theodore Melfi’s Oscar-nominated film in 2017. She graduated from the historically black West Virginia State College and taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia graduate schools in 1939. As the small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, her father sent her and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school. Johnson was born in August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. On Monday, Shetterly told the Associated Press Johnson’s story shone “a light on the stories of so many other people” and provided “a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history”. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Shetterly wrote. In the 2016 book Hidden Figures, on which the film of the same title was based, the author Margot Lee Shetterly wrote of Johnson’s “eye-numbing, disorienting work” crunching numbers. “Her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten,” he said. In a tweet, the Nasa administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said “our Nasa family” was saddened by the death of “an American hero”. Sometimes they have more imagination than men Katherine Johnson Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Johnson was also known for verifying calculations by the Nasa computer that plotted John Glenn’s mission into orbit, with lightning speed that led colleagues to call her a “human computer”. In 1961, she contributed trajectory analysis to Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.
Johnson first worked on airplane programs, then joined Project Mercury, the first US human space program. Inside the Naca facility in Hampton, Virginia, signs indicated which bathrooms women and African Americans could use. Johnson worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or Naca, a segregated computing unit which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Nasa, in 1958. It’s the same.In a statement, the US space agency said: “Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers.” If I gave you that answer last year, it’s the same now.
And it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to be coming out.īut you know, math is the same. I like the stars and the stories we were telling. The main thing is I liked what I was doing. I didn’t do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question – and succeeded there.
Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landings and the start of the Space Shuttle program. Katherine continued to work at NASA until 1986. But when they went to computers, they called over and said, "Tell her to check and see if the computer trajectory they had calculated was correct." So I checked it, and it was correct. Her legacy includes an extraordinary social impact as a pioneer in space science and computing that may be seen both from the honors she has received and the number of times her story is presented as a role model to aspiring young people. You could do much more, much faster on the computer. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backward and tell you when to take off." That was my forte.Įven after NASA had electronic computers, John Glenn requested that Katherine personally recheck the computer calculations before his 1962 Friendship 7 flight – the first American mission to orbit Earth. As a human computer, Katherine calculated the trajectory for astronaut Alan Shepard’s 1961 Freedom 7 mission to space – the first spaceflight for an American.Įarly on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start.
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