Force and Motion

Katherine Johnson: Trailblazer in Mathematics and Space Exploration

Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in West Virginia. At a very young age she demonstrated a special talent and interest in mathematics. “I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed… anything that could be counted, I did,” she once said.

Because of her advanced mathematics skills, Johnson was able to graduate high school at only 14 years old! She then enrolled at West Virginia State University—a historically Black college. While in college, she took every math class that was available. In fact, she even ran out of them! New advanced math courses were designed just so she could continue taking advanced math. In 1937, she graduated from college with the highest honors, earning degrees in Mathematics and French.

Following her graduation, Johnson taught public school for several years before returning to school as a graduate student in the math program at West Virginia State, which was then recently integrated. After leaving the program to focus on her family, she returned to teaching until 1952 when she heard about open positions at the Langley Laboratory based at the National Committee for Aeronautics (which would later become NASA) in Hampton, Virginia. Johnson accepted the offer and officially began her career as a mathematician for NASA.

Johnson got right to calculating flight trajectories in the West Area Computing section of Langley Laboratory, where hundreds of African-American, female mathematicians were working as human computers—reading, analyzing, and plotting data. “Everything was so new—the whole idea of going into space was new and daring. There were no textbooks, so we had to write them,” Johnson said.

Everything changed after the 1957 launch of Sputnik. The United States was determined to reach the moon, so NASA was the center of all the action. Johnson undertook trajectory analyses for America’s first human spaceflight, the Freedom 7 mission.

In 1960, she co-authored a report laying out equations for orbital spaceflight; it was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division helped author a research paper. This was only one of the 26 papers she would co-author throughout her career! In 1962, Johnson did her most famous work—helping prepare for astronaut John Glenn’s orbital mission. At the time, the new electronic computers were crunching numbers and producing equations for the flight, but the astronauts didn’t trust them. Glenn specifically asked that Johnson would run the numbers herself to confirm that the programmed calculations were correct. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,” Johnson remembers Glenn saying.

After 33 years of service, Johnson retired from NASA and received many prestigious awards and honors for her exceptional service. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony, President Barack Obama said, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” In 2019, she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2016, NASA dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Building at the Langley Research Center where she worked all those years.

Johnson’s life was also a main focus in the biographical book Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four African American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation into Space by Margot Lee Shetterly. The book was later adapted to the award-winning film Hidden Figures.

“Math. It’s just there. You’re either right or you’re wrong. That’s what I like about it,” Johnson once said.

Katherine Johnson sadly passed away very recently, on February 24, 2020. But all that she accomplished over more than three decades at NASA—breaking boundaries, calculating trajectories, and supporting historic space missions—will never be forgotten. In fact, it’s important that not only should we keep remembering and recording the stories of scientists that have been ‘hidden’ for so long, but we should continue to uncover more science heroes whose stories have yet to be recognized.”