Black History Month: Nasa Mathematician, Katherine Johnson Dies at 101
Written by Site Hub on February 25, 2020
One of the greatest mathematical minds in the country, Katherine Johnson, died on Monday at age 101. She was living at a retirement home in Newport News, VA.
Mrs. Johnson was responsible for calculating the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and let it return safely to Earth.
She spent 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division and was such an integral part of this launch and others – yet, almost nobody knew her name. Perhaps because she was a woman working for NASA before the modern feminist movement. Or perhaps it is because Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.
In her old age, she became highly celebrated and solidified her spot in Black History.
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, stating, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.”
In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.
RIP Mrs. Johnson
