Katherine Johnson spent 33 years as a mathematician at the Langley laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its successor, NASA, where she computed the flight paths that carried the first Americans into space. Beginning in a segregated pool of Black women “computers,” she became a research mathematician whose analyses supported Mercury and Apollo, and late in life she became a public symbol of the Black women whose work at NASA had long gone unrecognized.
At a Glance
- Born
- 26 August 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
- Died
- 24 February 2020, Newport News, Virginia
- Birth name
- Creola Katherine Coleman
- Known for
- Trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 (1961); verifying the orbit of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 (1962); Apollo rendezvous calculations
- HBCU ties
- West Virginia State University (Attended the high school on its campus; graduated from West Virginia State College in mathematics and French, 1937)
- Fields
- Science · Education
- Era
- Letters, Arts & Sciences
Early Life
Johnson was born Creola Katherine Coleman on 26 August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joshua and Joylette Coleman. Her aptitude for numbers carried her several grades ahead in school. Because Greenbrier County offered no public schooling for Black students past the eighth grade, her parents arranged for the children to attend the high school on the campus of West Virginia State College in Institute, and she was enrolled there by about age 13.
At West Virginia State she took every mathematics course offered and studied with W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in mathematics, who created advanced courses for her. She graduated in 1937, at 18, with degrees in mathematics and French, and took a job teaching at a Black public school in Virginia. In 1939, when West Virginia quietly began to integrate its graduate schools, the college’s president, John W. Davis, chose her and two men as the first Black students admitted to West Virginia University. She left after the first session to start a family with her first husband, James Goble.
Life and Work
After years of teaching and raising three daughters, Johnson learned that the NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, was hiring Black women as mathematicians. The family moved to Newport News, and she began work in June 1953 in the West Area Computing unit, a segregated section of Black women computers led by Dorothy Vaughan. Langley had begun recruiting Black women mathematicians during the Second World War, after Executive Order 8802 barred racial discrimination in the defense industries; under Virginia’s segregation laws, the West Computers worked apart from their white counterparts in the East Area. Vaughan had become the section’s head in 1949, the first Black supervisor at the laboratory. Just two weeks into the job, Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division; her temporary assignment soon became permanent, and her command of analytic geometry made her a valued member of an otherwise all-male group of engineers. Her husband died of cancer in December 1956, as she was completing one of her early flight research assignments; in 1959 she married James A. Johnson, an Army officer and Korean War veteran.
The segregated computing unit was dissolved in 1958. When the NACA became NASA that year, the Flight Research engineers took up the problems of spaceflight. In 1960 she and the engineer Ted Skopinski published “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,” making her the first woman in the Flight Research Division to receive credit as an author of a research report. She performed the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission of 5 May 1961, the first American human spaceflight.
For John Glenn’s orbital flight aboard Friendship 7 on 20 February 1962, NASA used electronic computers to calculate the orbit, but the astronauts distrusted the new machines. According to NASA’s account, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” — Johnson — to run the same equations by hand before he would fly, and she confirmed the computer’s numbers. Johnson later recalled Glenn saying that if she found them good, he was ready to go. Her later work included calculations that helped synchronize the Apollo Lunar Module with the orbiting Command and Service Module, as well as studies for the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, later renamed Landsat.
Johnson retired from Langley in 1986 after 33 years, having authored or coauthored 26 research reports. In retirement she spoke frequently to students, urging them to pursue mathematics and science.
Legacy
Wider recognition came late. On 24 November 2015, at age 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures and the film adapted from it, both released in 2016, told the story of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and the other Black women computers at Langley. In the film, in which Taraji P. Henson played Johnson, the timeline and several scenes were dramatized; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Johnson, then 98, appeared on stage at the February 2017 ceremony to a standing ovation. On 22 September 2017 NASA opened the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at Langley, a $23 million building consolidating the center’s data operations. Asked for her reaction to the naming, she replied, “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy.”
The Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act, signed on 8 November 2019, authorized Congressional Gold Medals for Johnson, Vaughan, Jackson, and Christine Darden, and a medal honoring all of NASA’s human computers. Johnson died in Newport News on 24 February 2020, at age 101. Her career documents both the exclusion Black women faced in American science and the precision of the work they did in spite of it.
Katherine Johnson’s precise mathematics helped send Americans into space, and her career shows both the exclusion Black women faced in science and the excellence they achieved despite it. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 26 August 1918 Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
- 1937 Graduates from West Virginia State College with degrees in mathematics and French.
- 1939 Selected as one of the first Black students admitted to West Virginia University’s graduate school.
- June 1953 Joins the NACA’s Langley laboratory in the West Area Computing unit.
- 1960 Coauthors a Flight Research Division report on satellite placement.
- 5 May 1961 Her trajectory analysis supports Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight.
- 20 February 1962 Verifies the orbital calculations for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission.
- 1986 Retires from NASA Langley after 33 years.
- 24 November 2015 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- 24 February 2020 Dies in Newport News, Virginia, at age 101.
Sources and Further Reading
- NASA, “Katherine Johnson Biography,” Langley Research Center. Link
- NASA, “NASA Langley’s Katherine Johnson Computational Research Facility Officially Opens,” 22 September 2017. Link
- Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act, S. 590, 116th Congress (2019). Link
- Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016).
- Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, “Remembering NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson.” Link
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