- Have you watched the movie Hidden Figures? If you haven’t, well you should, but if you did, do you know that Taraji P. Henson’s character was based on Katherine Johnson?
- Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician who calculated the flight paths of many spacecrafts at NASA; she helped send astronauts to the moon!
- She also skipped multiple grades and was chosen to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools along with two African American male students.
- In 1953, Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women known as the West Computers who manually solved complex mathematical calculations for NACA’s engineers. These women’s calculations were crucial to the success of the early U.S. space program.
- At the time, NACA was segregated, so the West Computers were not allowed to use the same bathrooms and eat at the same cafeterias as their white co-workers.
- In 1958, NACA was integrated into National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and NASA thankfully banned segregation.
- At NASA, Katherine worked in the Space Task Group. In 1960, she wrote a paper with Ted Skopinski, one of the group’s engineers, about the calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. This was the first time a woman in her division was recognized as an author of a research report.
- Despite all the hardships she endured because of her gender and race, Katherine Johnson authored/co-authored a total of 26 research papers.