Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual "computers who wore skirts." Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. She accepted and became part of the early NASA team.Īccording to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project: At first she worked in a pool of women performing math calculations. ![]() (It was superseded by the agency NASA in 1958.) At the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, based in Hampton, Virginia near Langley Field, NACA hired African-American mathematicians as well as whites for their Guidance and Navigation Department. It was not until 1952, at a family gathering, that a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians. The first jobs she found were in teaching. Johnson decided on a career as a research mathematician, although this was a difficult field for African Americans and women to enter. The court had ruled that states that provided public higher education to white students also had to provide it to black students, to be satisfied either by establishing black colleges and universities or by admitting black students to previously white-only universities. Davis, she became 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. At the time of her entry, she was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. In 1939, after marrying her first husband, James Goble, Johnson left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program, but quit after one year, having become pregnant and choosing to focus on her family. She took on a teaching job at a black public school in Virginia. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in Mathematics and French, at age 18. Claytor added new math courses just for Katherine. Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to receive a PhD in math. Multiple professors took Katherine under their wings, including chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had mentored the girl throughout high school, and W.W. As a student, Johnson took every math course offered by the college. Johnson graduated from high school at 14 and entered West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), a historically black college. The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer. Johnson was admitted when she was only 10 years old. This school was on the campus of West Virginia State College. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Coleman parents arranged for their children to attend high school in Institute, West Virginia. Johnson showed a talent for math from an early age. ![]() Her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman and worked at the Greenbrier Hotel. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia, the daughter of Joshua and Joylette Coleman. She was included in the BBC series 100 Women the following year. In 2015, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Johnson also did calculations for plans for a mission to Mars. Her calculations were critical to the success of these missions. During this time, 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, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, she conducted technical work at NASA that spanned decades. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson is an African-American physicist and mathematician who made contributions to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Main achievements: Calculating the trajectories for many NASA missions.
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