Feisty Female Friday: Katherine Johnson

The FFF this week is Katherine Johnson.

Born in W.Va., Katherine’s love for mathematics was a gift that she had at a young age. She was ready and anxious to go to school with her older siblings. Katherine loved to count everything, excelled in school, and by age 10, was in high school where she graduated early at 15, and entered college majoring in mathematics. She was encouraged to be a mathematician by a college professor and enrolled in an analytic geometry of space, a class which was created just for her. Katherine graduated with degrees in mathematics and French and ended up teaching after college since teaching was the only option in her community.

She left teaching to marry and start her family, but when her husband fell ill, Katherine began to teach again and was hired to work as an African American “female computer” doing calculations that the engineers needed reworked or verified in NACA. As she worked on the problems, they were also beginning work to on space exploration and travel. Katherine soon became the leader the men increasingly relied on for their calculations. She became an invaluable asset to the team, the only woman at the time to ever be pulled from the computing pool as she worked on calculating the trajectory for the US first space trips to the moon by Alan Shepard, John Glenn, the Apollo missions, and Space Shuttle landings.

She worked at the agency until 1986, when she retired after 33 years of service. During her tenure at NASA, Katherine received were the NASA Lunar Orbiter, NASA Special Achievement, and Mathematician of the Year Awards, an honorary Doctor of Law degree, honorary Doctor of Science degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and has a NASA facility named after her.

Katherine often spoke to students about her own extraordinary career and encouraged all of them to pursue STEM careers because she said that everything is physics and math. The movie “Simple Figures” tells her story of one of the most recognized and important “human computers” of our time. Her memoir, My Remarkable Journey, also includes many personal stories of a life filled with education, perseverance, humility, professional achievements, gender and racial equality milestones, and her role in the space race.
Katherine was a trailblazer in the quest for racial equality, champion of space flights, into a new era, and forged a path that would enable many others to follow in her steps. She encouraged women everywhere to work in STEM programs and remained a counter of things her entire life.

After retirement, Katherine traveled and spent time with her family of three children, six grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren, many of whom are involved in STEM fields today. Katherine passed at the age of 101 in VA.