Creola Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. She earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. She was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as a lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. In 2019, Johnson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
About Katherine Johnson in brief
Creola Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. She earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as a lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. In 2019, Johnson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Johnson was born as Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in mathematics and French, at age 18. She took on a teaching job at a black public school in Marion, Virginia. In 1939, after marrying her first husband, James Goble, she left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program. She quit after one year after becoming pregnant and choosing to focus on her family. Johnson decided on a career as a research mathematician, although this was a difficult field for African Americans and women to enter. At the Langley Memorial Aeronautics Laboratory, based in Hampton, Virginia, near Langley Field, NACA hired African-American mathematicians as well as whites. At first she worked in a pool of women performing math calculations as the women in the virtual pool. Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks.
Then one day, Katherine was assigned to help the all-male flight research team to help them temporarily assigned to a mission to Mars. She says she was ignored, but she was able to assert her knowledge of analytic geometry and make quick allies of male colleagues and bosses to the extent that they forgot to return me to the pool. In 1953, she wrote an oral history for the National Visionary Leadership Project. According to the oral history, Katherine has referred to the virtual women in virtual computers as “computers who wore skirts”. In 1953 she was referred to as “the women invirtual computers who wore computers who wore skirts”. She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. In 2009, she was presented with the Silver Snoopy Award by NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin and a NASA Group Achievement Award. She is survived by her husband and three children. She died in 2011. She had a son, James, who is now the president of the West Virginia State College of Science and Technology. She also had a daughter, Katherine Johnson, who was the first African- American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WestVirginia. In 2012, she became one of three African-Americans, and the only woman, selected to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. The court ruled that states that provided public higher education to white students also had to provide it to black students.
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This page is based on the article Katherine Johnson published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
