Katherine Johnson

Katherine Coleman was born on the twenty-sixth of August 1918 at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest of four children of Joshua Coleman — a farmer, handyman and Greenbrier Hotel bellhop who completed only the sixth grade — and Joylette Lowe Coleman, a former schoolteacher. The family town offered no school for Black children past the eighth grade; from her tenth year through her high-school education her father drove the family one hundred and twenty miles each fall to Institute, West Virginia, so that she and her siblings could attend the high school of West Virginia State Institute. She entered the West Virginia State Institute college at fifteen and at eighteen graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French.

She taught school at Marion, Virginia, from 1937 to 1939 and then briefly at the West Virginia State graduate school — the first Black students admitted to it under the 1938 Supreme Court ruling in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. She left graduate school after one term on her marriage to James Goble and through the following thirteen years raised three daughters as a homemaker and substitute teacher.

She was hired at NACA-Langley in June 1953 — three months after Dorothy Vaughan (placed in this archive) became the supervisor of West Area Computing. Within two weeks she had been seconded to the Flight Research Division at Langley — the all-white all-male division that conducted the aerodynamic-loads research on the experimental supersonic aircraft of the 1950s — where she remained for the rest of her career. She was the principal mathematician on the trajectory analysis for the May 1961 suborbital flight of Alan Shepard, the principal trajectory analyst for the February 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 orbital flight of John Glenn — Glenn at his pre-launch press conference said "get the girl to check the numbers, if she says they're good then I'm ready to go" — and contributed to the trajectory analysis for the Apollo 11 lunar landing of July 1969 and to the rendezvous calculations that returned the crippled Apollo 13 mission in April 1970.

She retired from NASA in 1986 after thirty-three years and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2015 at ninety-seven. The 2017 NASA Langley computational research facility is named the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility. She died at Newport News on the twenty-fourth of February 2020, at one hundred and one.

She is honored here as the mathematician of John Glenn's orbit.