Katherine Johnson, the famous American mathematician initially born Creola Katherine Coleman passed away on Monday 24th of February 2020 at the age of 101. Katherine Johnson’s Calculations of “Orbital Mechanics” played an important role in the success of the first and subsequent United states crewed space flights. She earned a reputation for herself for the mastery of complex manual calculations.
Katherine Johnson was born on the 26th of August 1918 in West Virginia to Joylette and Joshua Coleman. Her mother Joylette was a teacher and her father Joshua, was a lumberman, handyman and farmer and he also worked at a hotel called Greenbrier Hotel.
Katherine Johnson was enrolled in high school at the age of 10 in a school in Institute, West Virginia because public schools in Greenbrier did not offer schooling for African American students after eight grade.
Johnson graduated from high school at the age of 14 and attended West Virginia university taking every mathematics course offered by the university. One of her mentors at the University was Angie Turner King, (one of the first black women to obtain degrees in chemistry and mathematics).
Katherine Johnson graduated Summa Cum Laude (a Latin term used to describe the highest level of distinction) in 1927 at the age of 18. She then became a teacher in a black public school in Marion, Virginia.
1939, Katherine married her husband, James Goble, then resigned from her position at the public school in Marion, Virginia to further her studies. She enrolled for a graduate program in Mathematics at West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia.
Deciding to further her career as a research mathematician, Katherine landed a job at National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA, NASA’s predecessor in 1953. At the beginning of her career at NACA, Katherine worked with a group of women whose jobs were to calculate the data from the black boxes carried in aeroplanes (they were referred to as Human Computers).
With time, Katherine’s deep understanding of Analytic Geometry was quickly recognized by her male bosses and other work superiors that she rose out of her position of calculating the black box data.
In 1958, Johnson was transferred to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley’s Flight Research Division which was staffed mainly by white male engineers. In 1958, NACA was superseded by NASA, NASA adopted the use of digital computers and the Human Computers department was disbanded (Katherine’s former department).
During her time at NASA, Johnson was the mathematician that calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s (the first American in space) space flight of the 5th of May 1961. That same year she was also the mathematician that calculated the Launch Window (is a time frame when a particular vehicle must be launched in order to reach its intended target) for his Mercury Mission.
The first time NASA used digital computers to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around the earth, John Glenn (first American to orbit the Earth) requested Johnson specifically to calculate it manually, refusing to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations.
Johnson was also one of the Mathematicians behind the Apollo 11 flight to the moon in 1969 and Apollo 13 flight to the moon in 1970. Katherine Johnson was listed as one of the most influential women in BBC’s “100 Women” in 2016. Fondly referred to as the Human-Computer, the movie “Hidden Figures” was scripted after her life.
