Johnson joined the pool of calculatorial ladies in 1953, and was assigned her spot in the colored room to wait until she was needed.Ĭlassified as a “subprofessional” on account of her gender, she used slide rules and instinct to churn her way through masses of wind tunnel data. Not glorious jobs – primarily grinding out routine calculations that the aeronautic researchers and engineers couldn’t be bothered with, but real and steady work at the heart of a new frontier. She heard about jobs for girls with mathematical abilities at NACA. Her projects read like a Greatest Hits album of mankind’s efforts in space, from its slide-rule and wind tunnel origins to its dreams of interplanetary exploration and satellite proliferation.įor most women struggling to feed their family during the Depression, that, or something still more tragic, would have been the end of it, but fortune granted Johnson a break. She dropped her studies to find more work as a teacher to provide money for his care and for the raising of their three daughters. For two years she attended graduate school, but had to leave before obtaining her degree when her husband, who she’d married just after graduating West Virginia State, started succumbing to brain cancer. For fifteen years she carried on like this. Had she been a male, she would have been swooped up into the field of research mathematics that Evans encouraged her to pursue, but as an African American female in the late 1930s, teaching was more or less her only option, taking what jobs she could as they arose to keep herself out of the grinding maw of the Great Depression. Professor John Matthews, a fluent speaker of seven languages and head of the Romance Languages department, inspired her to study French and English, while Professor James Evans, who took her into his family as an adopted daughter of sorts, pushed her to continue expanding her substantial mathematical skills, with the result that she double majored in French and mathematics, getting her degrees at the age of nineteen. She attended West Virginia State, a historically African American school, and benefited from the intense and personal mentorship of her professors there. She chewed through the standard math courses handily and so her teachers developed a college-level course which had her as its only student. She entered school at the second grade, bypassing kindergarten and first grade entirely and then her teachers found her still so advanced that they skipped her over fifth grade as well, with the result that she entered high school at the age of ten. He only got to see them once a month when school was in session, but thought the sacrifice was worth it, especially as Katherine continually leapt with great bounds over and beyond her classmates. Her parents cared about education more than anything, and her father was willing to work in one city while the rest of the family lived in another just to ensure that she had access to a high school. She was a maestro of trajectories, NASA’s go-to mathematician for developing the equations of the country’s first ventures into space and, as could be expected, she showed genius from the start. August 26, 1918), who refused to be domineered by tradition and who, as a result, over thirty three years at NACA and NASA, made fundamental contributions to the Mercury and Apollo missions, the space shuttle, the mathematics of space flight, astronaut emergency navigation systems, satellite tracking techniques, and plans for a future Mars mission. And in a room separate even from those women was the place where the African American calculators were kept, segregated because of their race, and given brute force computational tasks because of their gender.Īll the externals spoke against sustained success for any non-white female mathematician and yet, from within that segregated room there came one person, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (b. Those calculations were handled by a small army of women who were “checked out” and “returned” to the mathematical pool as needed by the male scientists. Calculations, done almost entirely by hand, were the coursing lifeblood of the organization. Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as much as they could about the science of flight.
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