Katherine Johnson

Katherine Coleman Johnson was born on 26 August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest of four children. From an early age she displayed an extraordinary aptitude for numbers, later recalling that she counted everything — steps, dishes, the miles on a road. Because her home county did not offer public schooling for Black students beyond the eighth grade, her father drove the family 120 miles each way to Institute, West Virginia, so his children could continue their education, splitting the family's living arrangements across two towns for years to make it possible.

She entered West Virginia State College at just 14 and graduated summa cum laude at 18 with degrees in mathematics and French, having taken every mathematics course the college offered and had several created specifically for her by a professor who recognised her talent. She briefly taught school before marrying and starting a family, and in 1953 she took a position with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA's precursor, joining a segregated pool of Black women mathematicians known informally as 'human computers,' who performed complex calculations by hand for the all-white male engineers.

Johnson's work quickly distinguished her. Assigned temporarily to the Flight Research Division, she asked so many incisive questions and produced such reliable analysis that she was never returned to the computing pool. She co-authored a 1960 report on the trajectory equations for orbital spaceflight — the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as a report author. Her calculations determined the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, America's first crewed spaceflight, and for the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that first put men on the Moon.

Her most celebrated moment came in 1962, ahead of John Glenn's historic orbital flight. NASA had begun using electronic computers to calculate trajectories, but astronauts remained wary of trusting the new machines. Glenn specifically requested that Johnson personally verify the computer's numbers by hand before he would agree to fly, reportedly telling engineers, 'if she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go.' Johnson checked the calculations and confirmed them; Glenn's flight was a success, and the moment became emblematic of the trust placed in her precision under enormous pressure.

Johnson continued working at NASA until her retirement in 1986, contributing to the Space Shuttle programme and early plans for a mission to Mars. Throughout a 33-year career she authored or co-authored 26 research reports, a remarkable output in an era when Black women were rarely credited for scientific work at all. For decades her contributions remained largely unknown outside NASA itself.

Public recognition arrived late but substantially. In 2015, at age 97, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. The following year NASA named a new research facility the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility in her honour. Her story reached global audiences through the bestselling book and Academy Award-nominated film Hidden Figures (2016), which introduced millions to her work and that of her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. Katherine Johnson died in 2020 at the age of 101, having lived to see her contributions finally and fully acknowledged.