Today’s spotlight focuses on Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who worked for NASA. Emmanuel Perrodin-Njoku tells us more about her and some of the work she has done! This is video 6/6 from Emmanuel on different Black STEMists.
Transcript: Katherine Johnson was a brilliant research mathematician who always was fascinated by numbers. Born in 1918 and raised in West Virginia, she graduated from high school at 14 at a time when school for Black people often stopped at 8th grade for those who could attend school. When she was 18, she enrolled into the historically black West Virginia State College, where she found a mentor in math professor W.W. Schieffelin Claytor, who was the third Black person to earn a PhD in mathematics. In 1937, she graduated with honors and took a job teaching at a Black public school until West Virginia decided to integrate its graduate schools in 1939, where she was selected to be one of the first Black students (and the first Black woman) to attend West Virginia University. There, she enrolled in the graduate math program, but left after the first year becoming pregnant and to focus on her family. When her daughters became older, she returned to teaching, but in 1952, a relative told her that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians for the all-Black West Area Computing section at Langley Research Center in Virginia. She applied for the job and got it. In her years working as a “computer” for NACA, which then became NASA, she calculated trajectories, launch windows, and plotted back up navigation charts for astronauts and was indispensable in her role. She also contributed to Project Apollo, the Space Shuttle program, and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later renamed Landsat), on top of authoring or coauthoring 26 research reports. After 33 years at Langley, she retired in 1986, and she said in an interview, “I loved going to work every single day.” In 2015, when Johnson was 97, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, by Barack Obama, showcasing her extraordinary achievements and contribution to the country and science.
