Katherine Johnson: A Profile
Katherine Johnson works at her desk at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1960s. Credit: NASA
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica have written a series of mini-biographies. Here is an excerpt from Editors’ profile of Katherine Johnson. To learn more about her, please click here.
Note: She is the primary subject of a film, Hidden Figures (2016), that I highly recommend. Taraji P. Henson’s portrayal of her was not nominated for an Academy Award for an actress in a leading role. However, the film was and also stars Oscar winners Kevin Costner and Viola Davis.
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Katherine Johnson, née Katherine Coleman, also known as (1939–56) Katherine Goble, (born August 26, 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.), American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon.
[She died on February 24, 2020, living long enough to learn that the new NASA Research Center was named after her.]
Coleman’s intelligence and skill with numbers became apparent when she was a child, and, by the time she was 10 years old, she had started attending high school. In 1937, at age 18, Coleman graduated with highest honours from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. She subsequently moved to Virginia to take a teaching job. In 1939, however, she was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University. She studied math there but soon left after marrying James Goble and deciding to start a family. He died in 1956, and three years later she married James Johnson.
In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers. The women, known as the West Computers, analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early U.S. space program. During this time, NACA was segregated, and the West Computers had to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities. That changed in 1958 when NACA was incorporated into the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which banned segregation.
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.” Katherine Johnson
At NASA Johnson was a member of the Space Task Group. In 1960 she coauthored a paper with one of the group’s engineers about calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. It was the first time a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report. Johnson authored or coauthored 26 research reports during her career.