Katherine was born on August 26th, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia and nowadays she is still alive. In fact, Katherine turned 100 last year! She is the youngest of 4 children. Her mother worked as a teacher and her father was a farmer.

Katherine’s intelligence and skill with numbers became apparent when she was a child. As the County where her family lived didn’t offer schools for black people, they had to move to West Virginia so that Katherine could study. At 13 she started attending high school on the campus of West Virginia State College and by 18, she entered the college itself. Katherine graduated in maths and French with highest honors in 1937 and then started teaching children at a black public school in Virginia.

However, in 1939 Katherine was selected to be one of the first three black students to integrate the graduate program at the all-white West Virginia University. She studied maths there but soon left after marrying James Goble and deciding to start a family. They had 3 children but he died in 1956 due to a brain tumour, and three years later she married James Johns.

A few years before, in 1953 Katherine was offered a job at the NASA, where she joined a group of “human computers”. These women were known as the West Computers, they analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early US space program.

Nowadays, Katherine gives talks to young women about perseverance and encourages them to study STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics ). According to Katherine:

“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.”

Katherine is well known for calculating the trajectories for many NASA manned missions.

She took care of the calculations for the Mercury project, developed by NASA between 1961 and 1963. She was also in charge of calculating the Parabolic trajectory of Alan Shepard’s flew -first American who travelled to space in 1961-. Although the NASA started to use computers to run the equations of the flights, she was called to verify John Glenn’s orbit in 1962:

The computers had done all the math that would control the trajectory of John Glenn. But the astronaut wanted to be sure the calculations were correct, he was wary of trusting machines which suffered blackouts from time to time. So as a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run by hand the same equations that had been programmed into the computer. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” the astronaut said.

Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

Katherine is also known as she was part of the team that calculated where and when to launch the rocket for the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. They worked on this project for years and it ended up successfully sending the first three men to the Moon.

She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. In addition, she has received many different prizes:

• In 1999, West Virginia State College, Outstanding Alumnus of the Year.
• In 2015, President Barak Obama selected her to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States bestows on a civilian.
• In 2017, NASA honored Johnson and named a researching centre with her name.