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“Johnson needed to be better than her white male colleagues to succeed, and fortunately she was”
Add to that her gender, at a time when women weren’t credited with much competence for anything beyond home building and raising children, and you get the picture that she was no ordinary NASA mathematician. Her memoir dwells on the things she loved – mathematics, family and the supportive communities around her – but doesn’t shy away from details of the relentless cruelty, violence and injustice of racial segregation and prejudice that steeped the lives of her family and friends, and those of African American people in general.
Few, if any, of the other mathematicians who worked with Johnson at NASA during the space race share that kind of mainstream fame, but neither were they forced to overcome the kind of barriers Johnson faced. Her autobiography, written with input from two of her three daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore, charts how she got there. “How could I have imagined,” writes Johnson, in the introduction to her autobiography My Remarkable Journey, “that from ages 97 to 101 I would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a kiss from my favorite president) appear onstage at the Oscars receive thirteen honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa have four major buildings named in my honor, including a second NASA facility…” All that changed in 2016 following the success of Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film adaptation. Yet until a few years ago, not many people had heard of Katherine Johnson and her pioneering work as a mathematician at NASA during the space race. On the other hand, she apparently had no problem serving as a model for a Barbie-Puppe of the “Inspiring Women” series.IT IS rare to suddenly find yourself a household name at the age of 98. But she allegedly disagreed with how she was portrayed, so her toy figure was never sold.
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Like Margaret Hamilton, Nancy Grace Roman and the women astronauts, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison, a character of the Lego special series “Women of NASA” was dedicated to Johnson in 2017. On 24 February 2020, Johnson died aged 101 years.
#Katherine johnson nasa scientist verification#
In February 2019, NASA also dedicated a facility in her honour, the „ Independent Verification and Validation Facility“ in Fairmont, West Virginia. In 2017, NASA named the " Katherine Johnson Computational Research Facility" in Langley after her. In 2015, Katherine Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for her contribution to the moon landing and her lifetime achievement for NASA. Until her retirement in 1986, Johnson was also instrumental in the Sky Lab and Space Shuttle programmes. At the time, she was the only woman to make the move from the computer centre to another department.ĭuring the failed Apollo 13 mission, which had to return to Earth unplanned after the explosion of a fuel tank, Katherine Johnson helped calculate the return flight. Johnson, a black woman, had a doubly hard time, but she persevered, kept asking questions and impressed with her mathematical skills. The USA were intensifying efforts to catch up with the Soviets in space travel, creating opportunities for talented minds. In 1957, the “Sputnik” shock changed the American space flight research – and Johnson’s life. For several years she was primarily analysing flight data. First she worked as a teacher, then she spent some time at home to focus on her three daughters and, in 1953, began working at the NACA’s West Area Computing Unit, where Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan were also employed. She was born in White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia in 1918 and studied French and mathematics (after skipping several classes at school).
#Katherine johnson nasa scientist movie#
The most famous among the NASA women scientists of African-American origin, who gained belated fame through the movie “Hidden Figures”, was Katherine G. Katherine Johnson at the opening of the NASA Computational Research Facility named after her, in 2017 Mathematics genius and NASA icon