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Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)
From Nature: Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)
It's open sourced, but here's a few excerpts:
Katherine Johnson was the most recognized of the African American “human computers” — female mathematicians who worked at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), from the 1930s until the 1980s. Johnson was most proud of the calculations that she contributed to the Apollo 11 mission to place the first human on the Moon. But it was her role producing and checking the trajectory equations for astronaut John Glenn’s pioneering Project Mercury orbital space flight in 1962 that established her professional reputation.
Wider fame for Johnson came in 2016 with the publication of my group biography Hidden Figures, and the release of the film based on it. Asked about the challenges of being black in a segregated workplace, or of having upended the no-women policy in her division’s research meetings, she was most likely to reply: “I was just doing my job.”
A gifted mathematician who always followed her curiosity, Johnson became a powerful symbol of the often-unheralded contributions that women and minority ethnic groups have made to science, technology, mathematics and computing over the course of the twentieth century. Although her fascination with numbers was obvious from childhood — she recalled counting dishes, stars, steps, everything — the possibility of deploying her talent as a professional mathematician was anything but.
Born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, she and her three siblings were sent 200 kilometres away by their parents to be educated, because there was no local school beyond sixth grade for those who were called ‘coloured’ students in the pre-civil-rights-era United States. Teachers allowed her to skip several grades in school, and she was just 14 when she entered the historically black West Virginia State College in Institute to study mathematics...
... In 1952 she applied to work at NACA’s research outpost in Hampton, Virginia, then called the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory. She began her career in the all-black, all-female West Area Computing Unit, helmed by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan. Vaughan soon sent her to fill an opening in the Flight Research Division, a group that specialized in tests on actual aeroplanes, rather than wind-tunnel simulations. For five years, Johnson was part of an engineering team that investigated phenomena such as wake turbulence, leading to improved safety for military and commercial aviation...
... The Flight Research Division diverted its attention to spacecraft, and by 1958, Johnson had contributed to ‘Notes on Space Technology’, the agency’s first comprehensive reference document on space flight. By 1959, she had prepared a trajectory analysis for a crewed suborbital flight. The following year, she co-authored the research report ‘Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position’, laying out the equations that would form the basis of that crewed orbital space flight piloted by Glenn.
Her named credit on the report was a first for a woman in her division, and positioned her to play a part in a mission that enabled the United States to draw even with the Soviet Union — one of the pivotal moments of the space race. In the days leading up to Glenn’s flight, the astronaut asked Johnson — “the girl”, as he called her — to hand-check the trajectory equations that had been input into the IBM 7090 computer. The flight forever linked a black female mathematician to one of the United States’ most glorious achievements.
Wider fame for Johnson came in 2016 with the publication of my group biography Hidden Figures, and the release of the film based on it. Asked about the challenges of being black in a segregated workplace, or of having upended the no-women policy in her division’s research meetings, she was most likely to reply: “I was just doing my job.”
A gifted mathematician who always followed her curiosity, Johnson became a powerful symbol of the often-unheralded contributions that women and minority ethnic groups have made to science, technology, mathematics and computing over the course of the twentieth century. Although her fascination with numbers was obvious from childhood — she recalled counting dishes, stars, steps, everything — the possibility of deploying her talent as a professional mathematician was anything but.
Born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, she and her three siblings were sent 200 kilometres away by their parents to be educated, because there was no local school beyond sixth grade for those who were called ‘coloured’ students in the pre-civil-rights-era United States. Teachers allowed her to skip several grades in school, and she was just 14 when she entered the historically black West Virginia State College in Institute to study mathematics...
... In 1952 she applied to work at NACA’s research outpost in Hampton, Virginia, then called the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory. She began her career in the all-black, all-female West Area Computing Unit, helmed by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan. Vaughan soon sent her to fill an opening in the Flight Research Division, a group that specialized in tests on actual aeroplanes, rather than wind-tunnel simulations. For five years, Johnson was part of an engineering team that investigated phenomena such as wake turbulence, leading to improved safety for military and commercial aviation...
... The Flight Research Division diverted its attention to spacecraft, and by 1958, Johnson had contributed to ‘Notes on Space Technology’, the agency’s first comprehensive reference document on space flight. By 1959, she had prepared a trajectory analysis for a crewed suborbital flight. The following year, she co-authored the research report ‘Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position’, laying out the equations that would form the basis of that crewed orbital space flight piloted by Glenn.
Her named credit on the report was a first for a woman in her division, and positioned her to play a part in a mission that enabled the United States to draw even with the Soviet Union — one of the pivotal moments of the space race. In the days leading up to Glenn’s flight, the astronaut asked Johnson — “the girl”, as he called her — to hand-check the trajectory equations that had been input into the IBM 7090 computer. The flight forever linked a black female mathematician to one of the United States’ most glorious achievements.