Katherine Johnson finished high school at 14 and college at 18 at a time when very few Black girls in America were allowed in advanced math classes at all. She loved numbers so much she said she counted everything - the steps to school, the dishes she washed.
In 1953 she joined NASA’s predecessor as a “human computer,” doing math by hand for engineers. The computing room was segregated - Black women worked in a separate building, with separate bathrooms and lunch tables. Katherine kept pushing into rooms she wasn’t invited into and quietly proved she belonged.
She calculated the exact path that sent Alan Shepard into space, the orbit for John Glenn, and the trajectory for Apollo 11’s trip to the Moon. She kept working at NASA until 1986. In 2015, President Obama gave her the country’s highest civilian honor, and her story became the film Hidden Figures.
