During this time, NACA was segregated, and the West Computers had to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities. The women, known as the West Computers, analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early U.S.

In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers.

A photograph from the 1960s shows Katherine Johnson at work at her desk at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

He died in 1956, and three years later she married James Johnson. She studied math there but soon left after marrying James Goble and deciding to start a family. In 1939, however, she was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University. She subsequently moved to Virginia to take a teaching job. In 1937, at age 18, Coleman graduated with highest honours from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.Coleman’s intelligence and skill with numbers became apparent when she was a child, and, by the time she was 10 years old, she had started attending high school. Onscreen, Johnson was portrayed by Taraji P Henson.Īmong tributes on Monday, the science writer Maryam Zaringhalam posted a quote by Johnson: “Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing.

She joined Naca in 1952 but with fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Dr Christine Darden, her story of overcoming racial and gender-based discrimination to become an integral part of Nasa’s work in space exploration was largely overlooked until the release of Theodore Melfi’s Oscar-nominated film in 2017.

She graduated from the historically black West Virginia State College and taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia graduate schools in 1939. As the small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, her father sent her and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school. Johnson was born in August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. On Monday, Shetterly told the Associated Press Johnson’s story shone “a light on the stories of so many other people” and provided “a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history”. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Shetterly wrote. In the 2016 book Hidden Figures, on which the film of the same title was based, the author Margot Lee Shetterly wrote of Johnson’s “eye-numbing, disorienting work” crunching numbers. “Her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten,” he said. In a tweet, the Nasa administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said “our Nasa family” was saddened by the death of “an American hero”. Sometimes they have more imagination than men Katherine Johnson Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Johnson was also known for verifying calculations by the Nasa computer that plotted John Glenn’s mission into orbit, with lightning speed that led colleagues to call her a “human computer”. In 1961, she contributed trajectory analysis to Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space. Johnson first worked on airplane programs, then joined Project Mercury, the first US human space program. Inside the Naca facility in Hampton, Virginia, signs indicated which bathrooms women and African Americans could use. Johnson worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or Naca, a segregated computing unit which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Nasa, in 1958. In a statement, the US space agency said: “Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers.”

Katherine johnson nasa quotes