About Katherine

Quick Facts
Full Name: Katherine Johnson
Born: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia - August 26th, 1918
Best Known For: Studying how to use geometry for space travel

From a young age, Katrine Johnson was intelligent and skilled with mathematics. When she was 18 years old, Kathrine graduated from West Virginia State College with a bachelor’s degree in maths and French. She achieved the highest honours which lead her to be selected for a graduate program at the college. The graduate program allowed her to study maths until she married and started a family.

Later in her life, Kathrine started working with the National Advisory committee for Aeronautics in the West Area Computing Unit. This was a group of African American woman who manually perform complex mathematical computations for program engineers. Katherine’s career then led her to begin working at NASA where she was able to calculate and analyse the flight paths of many spacecrafts with the US space program.

Some of her key achievements at NASA were that she helped send astronauts to the moon, played an important role in the Mercury program, and created a flight path for freedom 7 (The space craft who put the first US astronaut into space!)

In addition to all this success, she co-authored a paper with calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. This made her the first woman in her division to receive credit as an author on an academic paper! Katherine has also received many awards for her work including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, making her an inspiration to many engineers in the modern day.