Katherine Johnson
Creola Katherine Coleman August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020, born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joylette Roberta and Joshua McKinley Coleman. She was the youngest of four children. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman. He also worked at the Greenbrier Hotel.
Johnson showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Colemans arranged for their children to attend high school in Institute, West Virginia. This school was on the campus of West Virginia State College (WVSC); Johnson was enrolled when she was ten years old. The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer.
After graduating from high school at the age of 14, Johnson matriculated at WVSC, a historically black college. She took every course in mathematics offered by the college. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in mathematics and French, at age 18.
Creola Katherine Johnson whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her “historical role as one of the first African American women to work as a NASA scientist”.
Johnson’s work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. She was known as a “human computer” for her tremendous mathematical capability and ability to work with space trajectories with such little technology and recognition at the time.
