![]() Johnson applied, and the following year she was accepted for a position at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1952, Johnson learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring African American women to serve as "computers " namely, people who performed and checked calculations for technological developments. The 'Computer'īeginning in the late 1930s, Johnson taught math and French at schools in Virginia and West Virginia. However, she found the environment less welcoming than it had been in Institute, and never completed her program there. The following year, Johnson became one of three students to desegregate West Virginia University's graduate school in Morgantown. At age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French. in mathematics, who was determined to prepare Johnson to become a research mathematician. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. One particularly engaged professor was Dr. Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) in Institute, West Virginia, where she encountered a hands-on faculty. Although her town didn’t offer classes for African Americans after that point, her father, Joshua, drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where they lived while she attended high school. A bright child with a gift for numbers, she breezed through her classes and completed the eighth grade by age 10. ![]() Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. Johnson was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and saw her story brought to light through a book and a feature film the following year. She began working in aeronautics as a "computer" in 1952, and after the formation of NASA, she performed the calculations that sent astronauts into orbit in the early 1960s and to the moon in 1969. UPDATE: Katherine Johnson passed away on February 24, 2020.Ģ016 Virginia Women in History honoree, Library of Virginia.Katherine Johnson made the most of limited educational opportunities for African Americans, graduating from college at age 18. In 2015 she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her accomplishments. She retired from NASA in 1986, and for many years continued to speak with school groups, urging students to pursue opportunities in math and science. For the first moon landing in 1969, she calculated how to propel space capsules into orbit around the moon and how to send landing units to and from the lunar surface. She calculated the landing trajectory for the first American in space-Alan Shepard's 1961 mission. Temporarily assigned to an all-male team in the Flight Research Division, Johnson demonstrated her knowledge of analytic geometry and was assigned to the Space Task Group of the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. Johnson joined NACA in 1953 as a research mathematician and was part of a pool of women she has described as "computers who wore skirts," who read data, ran it through engineering equations, and turned it into usable information. When she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later Langley Research Center) was hiring African American women to verify calculations needed by engineers, she and her family moved to the vicinity of Hampton, Virginia. After graduating from West Virginia State College (later University) in 1937, she taught school, married, and had three daughters. A stellar student, she began college at age fifteen and was encouraged to study advanced math, including a course on the analytic geometry of space that was developed just for her. Growing up in West Virginia, Katherine Johnson was fascinated with numbers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |