Mathematics and space flight · born 1918–2020
Katherine Johnson
Surprising fact
Astronaut John Glenn refused to fly until she checked the machine’s numbers by hand.
Katherine Johnson counted everything as a child in West Virginia: steps, dishes, hymn verses. She finished school at fourteen and college at eighteen, then taught maths while it stayed quiet that a Black woman was doing geometry better than most men with degrees.
In 1953 she joined the pool of women who computed for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the agency that became NASA. The work was told as machine work, but the early machines were people like her, checking numbers that pilots trusted with their lives.
When the machines arrived, nobody trusted them at first. Before John Glenn orbited the Earth in 1962 he asked for the person, not the computer: have the numbers checked by her. If she agreed with the machine, he said, he would fly. She agreed, and he went.
She also worked out the paths that took the Apollo missions to the Moon and home again, and co-authored one of the first papers written about putting a satellite over a rotating Earth. She retired in 1986 after thirty-three years.
In 2015 the President put the Medal of Freedom around her neck. She had done the maths half a century before; the country had simply taken a while to look up from the numbers.
Sources: NASA; Encyclopædia Britannica.
The quiz
Before John Glenn orbited the Earth, he asked for one thing before he would fly. What was it?
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