Catherine Johnson

Creola Katherine Johnson (August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights.

During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks.

The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".

Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon.

Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars.

She was known as a "human computer" for her tremendous mathematical capability and ability to work with space trajectories with such little technology and recognition at the time.

Katherine Johnson was born as Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joylette Roberta (née Lowe) and Joshua McKinley Coleman.

She was the youngest of four children.

Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman.

He also worked at the Greenbrier Hotel.

Johnson showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age.

Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Colemans arranged for their children to attend high school in Institute, West Virginia.

This school was on the campus of West Virginia State College (WVSC); Johnson was enrolled when she was ten years old.

The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer.

After graduating from high school at the age of 14, Johnson matriculated at WVSC, a historically black college.

She took every course in mathematics offered by the college.

Several professors mentored her, including the chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had guided Coleman throughout high school, and W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African-American to receive a doctorate in mathematics.

Claytor added new mathematics courses just for Johnson.

She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in mathematics and French, at age 18.

Johnson was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

She took on a teaching job at a black public school in Marion, Virginia.

Through WVSC's president, John W. Davis, she became one of three African-American students, and the only woman, selected to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States Supreme Court ruling in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada required States which provided public higher education to white students to provide it to black students as well, either by establishing black colleges and universities or by admitting black students to previously white-only universities.

Johnson decided on a career as a research mathematician, although this was a difficult field for African Americans and women to enter.

The first jobs she found were in teaching.

In 1939, after marrying her first husband, James Goble, she left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program.

She quit at the end of the first session and chose to focus on her family life.

She was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

At a family gathering in 1952, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians.

At the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, based in Hampton, Virginia, near Langley Field, NACA hired African-American mathematicians as well as whites for their Guidance and Navigation Department.

Johnson accepted a job offer from the agency in June 1953.

According to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project:

At first she [Johnson] worked in a pool of women performing math calculations.

Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual "computers who wore skirts".

Their main job was to read the data from the plane's black boxes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks.

Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team.

In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2016, she was presented with the Silver Snoopy Award by NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin and a NASA Group Achievement Award.

She was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as a lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

In 2019, Johnson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress.

In 2021, she was inducted posthumously into the National Women's Hall of Fame.