Katherine Johnson

Greenbrier County would not school Black children past the eighth grade, so her parents moved the family across the state for each school year to Institute, West Virginia, where a high school sat on the campus of the state's Black college. She enrolled at 10 and finished at 14. Her father cut lumber, farmed, and worked at the Greenbrier Hotel. Her mother taught. At West Virginia State she took every mathematics course on the books, and the mathematician W. W. Schieffelin Claytor wrote new ones for her. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, at 18, in mathematics and French, and went to teach in Marion, Virginia. In 1939 she was one of three Black students, and the only woman, chosen to integrate West Virginia University's graduate school.

NACA hired her in June 1953 into a pool of Black women who did arithmetic by hand in a separate room. Lent to the all-male flight research division, she made herself useful enough that nobody sent her back, and she talked her way into editorial meetings no woman had attended. In 1960 she and Ted Skopinski published a report on placing a satellite over a chosen point on Earth — the first in her division to carry a woman's name. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's flight in May 1961. When NASA moved onto IBM machines, John Glenn asked that she check the numbers by hand before he went up. She worked on Apollo 11, on the Apollo 13 backup procedures, on the Space Shuttle and on plans for reaching Mars, and coauthored 26 papers before retiring in 1986.

Her husband James Goble died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1956, three years into the job, and left her with three daughters and the arithmetic of the space program. She married Jim Johnson in 1959 and stayed married 60 years. The other cost was credit. NASA desegregated the Langley installation in 1958 and the discrimination stayed on in smaller forms, and her name reached the 1960 report only because Skopinski, leaving for Houston, told their supervisor that Johnson had done most of the work and should be the one to finish it. She said afterward that the supervisor was no admirer of women, and that women in those days had to be assertive and aggressive, and that how much depended on where you were standing.

The recognition arrived nearly all at once, half a century late. Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2015, at 97. Margot Lee Shetterly's book and the 2016 film Hidden Figures put her in front of a global audience, and the Academy Awards gave her a standing ovation. NASA named a computational research facility for her at Langley and a verification facility in West Virginia. Congress voted her a Gold Medal in 2019. She died in a Newport News retirement home on February 24, 2020, at 101. Fairfax County took a Confederate poet's name off a middle school and put hers on, and in 2025 the Space Force launched a GPS satellite under her full name.

Katherine Johnson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position article
  With Ted Skopinski. The first report in her division to carry a woman's name. 1960
• Freedom 7 trajectory mission
  The path that put Alan Shepard up and made his capsule easy to find on the way down 1961
• Friendship 7 verification mission
  Glenn asked that the IBM output be rechecked by hand before he flew 1962
• Apollo 11 lunar calculations mission 1969
• Apollo 13 backup procedures mission
  Including a one-star observation method for navigating without instruments 1970
• Earth Resources Satellite work mission
  One of the later programs she carried before retiring in 1986 1975

• August 26, 1918 aged 0 Born Creola Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs
• 1928 aged ~10 Enrolls in high school at 10, on a college campus across the state Greenbrier County offered Black students no public schooling past the eighth grade.
• 1937 aged ~19 Graduates summa cum laude at 18 in mathematics and French
• 1939 aged ~21 Integrates the graduate school at West Virginia University One of three Black students chosen after Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, and the only woman. She left after one session.
• June 1953 aged 34 Joins NACA's West Area Computing section A segregated pool of Black women doing calculations by hand.
• 1956 aged ~38 Her husband James Goble dies of an inoperable brain tumor She was left with three daughters.
• May 5, 1961 aged 42 Alan Shepard flies the trajectory she calculated
• November 24, 2015 aged 97 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom at 97
• February 24, 2020 aged 101 Dies at a Newport News retirement home at 101

• John Glenn 1921–2016
  First American to orbit Earth and later the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. checked the numbers for
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. computed his trajectory
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. awarded her the Medal of Freedom
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. parallel career in early computing
• Mae Jemison b. 1956
  First African American woman in space, physician, and advocate for science education and global health. walked through the door she opened
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. built the rockets her numbers flew