Portrait of Katherine Johnson. Credits: NASA
Maybe you know her, and if not, it’s great that you’re reading this, let’s talk about an exceptional person, and mathematician. She helped calculate trajectories for NASA missions, using only her brain, pen and paper. This was before there were computers everywhere. She was extremely intelligent, having finished high school at 14 and graduated college at 18.
She literally worked as a “human computer”, she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and also helped with the calculation of the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon that accomplished a lunar landing for the first time.
Even after the first computers calculated trajectories, astronauts requested that she checked the trajectories because of the high trust that everyone had on her. Astronaut John Glenn (who did an orbital mission around Earth) said “If she says they’re good (the trajectories), then I’m ready to go”, his flight was perfect.
It’s really important that we mention that in this period where she worked, there was still a great deal of racism, she and other black women had to use other restrooms and eat separately from their white co-workers. The office where they worked was labeled “Colored Computers”.
In 2015, a movie called “Hidden Figures” was made, based (loosely) on her and other mathematicians, but what’s important is that it gives her, and other women, credit about their achievements and the opportunity for all of the people that don’t know just how important they were for all of the NASA missions at the beginning of the space exploration era.
So we must see in her an example of transcendence, how she was able to accomplish all of this with her hard work, and to stand out in a world where only men, mostly white, were taken seriously, and given credit.
Former NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson is seen after President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2015, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington.Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls
She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 from President Barack Obama.
SOURCES:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-loved-to-count