Katherine Johnson Biography

Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in West Virginia, and she began showing a great deal of intelligence at a young age. She went on to begin high school at the age 10, when most African-American schooling stopped at age 10. Johnson graduated high school at the age 14. After high school she attended West Virginia State College. As a student, Johnson took every math course the college offered, and graduated with degrees in math and French at the age 18. In 1938, Johnson became the first African American woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University.
In 1953, she began working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA. The NACA hired women for the tedious and precise work of computers we know today, these women had the job title of “computer.” At first she worked in a pool of technical women performing math calculations. Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Then one day, Katherine were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine's knowledge of analytic geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues.
Johnson went on to calculate the trajectory patterns and backup navigational charts for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. In 1962, when NASA used …show more content…
Johnson Computational Research Facility was formally dedicated at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. This occurred on the 55th anniversary of Alan Shepard's historic rocket launch, which Johnson helped make possible. On November 24, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Katherine Johnson. She was selected because of her contributions to the space program, starting with the Mercury missions in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, through the Apollo moon missions in the late ’60s and early ‘70s, and ending with the space shuttle missions in the mid