The Great Mathematicians
Meet the Black Female NASA Genius Who Helped Send the First American Into Space
Remember that time we sent the first American into space? You should thank black mathematician and NASA genius Katherine Johnson for that. The hottest celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture video! Our POPSUGAR hosts bring you the latest celebrity updates, exclusive celebrity interviews, fun TV recaps and movie reviews, and pop culture mashups. We are huge fans of everyone from Beyonce and Angelina Jolie to Harry Styles and Jennifer Lawrence (and, of course, Ryan Gosling).
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is a physicist and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, her technical work at NASA spanned decades during which she calculated the trajectories, launch windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program and even early plans for the Mission to Mars.
Early Life
Johnson was born in 1918, to Joshua and Joylette Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. She was the youngest of four children. Her father worked as a lumberman, a farmer, a handyman, and at the Greenbrier Hotel. Her mother was a former teacher. Early on, Johnson showed a talent for math. Her parents emphasized the importance of education. Because Greenbrier County did not offer schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Coleman children attended high school in Institute, Kanawha County, West Virginia. The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer.
Johnson graduated from high school at age 14. At age 15, she began attending West Virginia State College. As a student, Johnson took every math course the college offered. Multiple professors took Johnson under their wings, including chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had also mentored Johnson throughout high school, and W.W. Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to receive a PhD in math. Claytor added new math courses just for Johnson. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in math and French, at age 18. After graduation, Johnson moved to Marion, Virginia, to teach math, French, and music at a small grade school.
In 1938, Johnson became the first African American woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, Monongalia County, West Virginia. She was one of three African American students, and the only female, selected to integrate the graduate school after the United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada.
Career
Johnson at NASA in 1966
Johnson decided on a career in mathematics with interest in being a research mathematician, a path with many closed doors for African American women at the time. The first jobs she could find were in teaching. At a family gathering, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), later to become NASA, was looking for new people. They were recently open to hiring African American women for their Guidance and Navigation Department. Johnson was offered a job in 1953, and she immediately accepted and became part of the early NASA team.
Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder, based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly. The film stars Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, the African American mathematician who calculated flight trajectories for Project Mercury and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. The film also features Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons.
Principal photography began in early March 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. The film was released on December 25, 2016 by 20th Century Fox
