Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson, (1918 - 2020), was an American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon. Her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia. The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Johnson’s life. She provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. In 2015, at age 97, Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. - This digital collectible is created exclusively for the purpose of fine art and is made solely for non-commercial, personal use. Please refer to the Boss Beauties Role Models end user license agreement for more information.