Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1914, and died on February 24, 2020. She was very good at math and started high school at the early age of 10. She went to college at 15 years old and graduated at 18. She taught black students math for a while, then enrolled at graduate school at West Virginia University. She studied math for a while, but then left to start a family and go back to teaching. In 1953 she learned about a job at a place now known as NASA. The job looked for black women with good computing and math skills. Her job was to be a computing innovation, a human computer. In that job she had to figure out different calculations needed for spaceflight. That is not all she did there, she also defied segregation, like going to the white women's restroom. One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961. A year later she helped find out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet which was another American first. In 1969, she calculated the path of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11. The sad thing is that she was forgotten, and all the white men were credited with all of these discoveries.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/katherine-johnson-dead.html
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/katherine-johnson
https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography
