Katherine Johnson, a mathematician for NASA died at the age of 101. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918.  Her brilliance with numerical calculations catapulted her ahead several grades in school. By age 13, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At 18, she enrolled in Virginia State. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and was hired as a teacher at a black public school in Virginia.  

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Johnson later left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program. At the end of the first semester, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her first husband, James Goble.  She returned to teaching after her three daughters got older.  In 1952 she applied for a position in the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory.   Johnson and her husband  moved the family to Newport News, Virginia to pursue the opportunity, where she began working at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. 

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history and Johnson’s life. In 1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official space travel.  NACA, later became NASA. Johnson did trajectory analysis for America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she coauthored, Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for.  Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Johnson would talk about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later renamed Landsat) and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley.  In 2015, at age 97, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, America’s highest civilian honor.  In 2016, her life was portrayed in the hit movie, Hidden Figures.
 

Katherine Johnnson died on Feb. 24, 2020.  Thank you for your contribution to the world! Rest well and rise in glory.
 

Source: NASA

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