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Katherine johnson nasa scientist5/9/2023 Originally assigned to the West Area Computers section which was supervised by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan, she was reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley's Flight Research Division. Katherine was assertive, asking to be included in editorial meetings (where no women had gone before.) She simply told people she had done the work and that she belonged.įrom 1953 through 1958, Johnson worked as a "computer", doing analysis for topics such as gust alleviation for aircraft. Katherine's knowledge of analytic geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues to the extent that, "they forgot to return me to the pool." While the racial and gender barriers were always there, Katherine says she ignored them. Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. 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 black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Johnson was offered a job in 1953, and she immediately accepted and became part of the early NASA team.Īccording to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project:Īt first she worked in a pool of women performing math calculations. They were recently open to hiring African-American women for their Guidance and Navigation Department. At a family gathering, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), later to become NASA, was looking for new people. The first jobs she could find were in teaching. Johnson decided on a career in mathematics with interest in being a research mathematician, a path with many closed doors for African-American women at the time. She was one of three African-American students, and the only female, selected to integrate the graduate school after the United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. In 1938, Johnson became the first African-American woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, Monongalia County, West Virginia. After graduation, Johnson moved to Marion, Virginia, to teach math, French, and music at a small grade school. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in math and French, at age 18. Claytor added new math courses just for Johnson. Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to receive a PhD in math. Multiple professors took Johnson under their wings, including chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had also mentored Johnson throughout high school, and W.W. As a student, Johnson took every math course the college offered. At age 15, she began attending West Virginia State College. Johnson graduated from high school at age 14. The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer. Because Greenbrier County did not offer schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Coleman children attended high school in Institute, Kanawha County, West Virginia. Her parents emphasized the importance of education. Early on, Johnson showed a talent for math. Her father worked as a lumberman, a farmer, a handyman, and at the Greenbrier Hotel. Johnson was born in 1918, to Joshua and Joylette Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, her technical work at NASA spanned decades during which she participated in calculating the trajectories, launch windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program and even early plans for the Mission to Mars. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is a physicist and mathematician who made contributions to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA.
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