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Feb 24, 2020 · Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician who helped put a man on the moon, died at 101. Here's a look back at the hidden figure's remarkable life.
- Henry Blodget
Margot Lee Shetterly (born June 30, 1969) is an American nonfiction writer who has also worked in investment banking and media startups. Her first book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016), is about African-American women mathematicians working at NASA who were ...
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Katherine Johnson was the most recognized of the African American “human computers” — female mathematicians who worked at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), from the 1930s until the 1980s. Johnson was most proud of the calculations that she contributed to the Apollo 11 mission to place the first human on the Moon. But it was her role producing and checking the trajectory equations for astronaut John Glenn’s pioneering Project Mercury orbital space flight in 1962 that established her professional reputation.
Wider fame for Johnson came in 2016 with the publication of my group biography Hidden Figures, and the release of the film based on it. Asked about the challenges of being black in a segregated workplace, or of having upended the no-women policy in her division’s research meetings, she was most likely to reply: “I was just doing my job.”
A gifted mathematician who always followed her curiosity, Johnson became a powerful symbol of the often-unheralded contributions that women and minority ethnic groups have made to science, technology, mathematics and computing over the course of the twentieth century. Although her fascination with numbers was obvious from childhood — she recalled counting dishes, stars, steps, everything — the possibility of deploying her talent as a professional mathematician was anything but.
Born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, she and her three siblings were sent 200 kilometres away by their parents to be educated, because there was no local school beyond sixth grade for those who were called ‘coloured’ students in the pre-civil-rights-era United States. Teachers allowed her to skip several grades in school, and she was just 14 when she entered the historically black West Virginia State College in Institute to study mathematics. There, she became the top student of acclaimed topologist William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in maths. Neither pupil nor teacher knew where, or even if, she would be able to put this rigorous training to work; prior to the Second World War, women with mathematics degrees were most often required to go into classroom teaching.
Johnson graduated in 1937 and, predictably, spent two years teaching in West Virginia’s segregated public schools. In 1939, she was hand-picked by the president of West Virginia State College to be one of the first black students to be allowed to study in the graduate programme in West Virginia University, Morgantown. After one semester, however, she left to get married, and spent the next 13 years raising a family and teaching in public schools in neighbouring Virginia.
- Margot Lee Shetterly
- 2020
Nov 22, 2016 · Died: Feb. 24, 2020. Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV. Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937. Hired by NACA: June 1953. Retired from NASA: 1986. Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson. Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly.
May 8, 2020 · Katherine Johnson, a mathematician for NASA and its predecessor agency, passed away on 24 February at age 101. She and women like her worked unseen for decades to ensure America's success in the space race. The 2016 movie Hidden Figures finally brought her story to light.
- Shirley M. Malcom
- 2020
Nov 11, 2022 · "Hidden Figures," a 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly and a movie based on the book, celebrates the contributions of some of those workers. History of human computers at NASA
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Sep 8, 2016 · “These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and...
