Katherine Johnson

Katherine Coleman was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest of four children. Her father, Joshua McKinley Coleman, made his living as a farmer, handyman, and lumberman who also worked at the nearby Greenbrier Hotel; her mother, Joylette, was a teacher. A prodigy who counted everything around her, Katherine finished the eighth grade before she was ten, and — because her home county offered no schooling for Black children past that grade — her family moved so she could attend high school on the campus of West Virginia State College.

She graduated from high school at fourteen and from West Virginia State summa cum laude at eighteen, earning degrees in mathematics and French. Mentored by the mathematician W.W. Schieffelin Claytor, she was later chosen as one of three Black students to integrate West Virginia University's graduate program. In 1953 she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — soon to become NASA — at Langley, entering the pool of Black women "human computers" whose calculations powered American flight.

Her mind carried astronauts into space. She computed the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, and when electronic computers were first entrusted with John Glenn's 1962 Mercury orbital mission, Glenn asked that "the girl" personally verify the machine's numbers before he would fly. Her work extended to the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing and the Space Shuttle, her precision helping bring crews safely home across three decades at Langley.

She retired in 1986 after thirty-three years of service, and in 2015 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Katherine Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. She charted the paths of others to the heavens; may her own name be counted forever among the stars she helped humankind reach.