Sometimes they have more imagination than men.” “Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. She received the NASA Langely Research Center Special Achievement Award in 1971, 1980, 1984, 19.īelow, we take a look at some of Katherine Johnson’s most inspirational quotes: Johnson has been the recipient of NASA’s Lunar Spacecraft and Operation’s Group Achievement Award and NASA’s Apollo Group Achievement Award.
Here she calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepherd, the first American to go into space in 1959, as well as many other significant missions until her retirement in 1986. In 1953 she was employed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, later becoming National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where she formed part of the Space Task Group. By the age of 10 she had started attending high school and by the age of 18 had graduated with the highest honours from West Virginia State College, earning bachelor’s degrees in Maths and French. Johnson’s skill and intelligence with numbers became apparent when she was a young child. Her calculations were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. We also hope they are inspired by her persistence, strength tenacity and fearlessness.Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician who calculated and analysed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades as a NASA employee. We assisted in researching the HBCUs that were so much a fond part of her experience, as well as background research on one of the professors who greatly influenced her.”Īsked what message they hope readers take away, Hylick and Moore said, “We hope readers will see how important education was to her and her family. We did some historical research to put her story in context of the times in which she lived. We found some handwritten notes and letters. Of course, we had our own memories of her stories. “We had a wealth of good detailed stories and information. Of the research they did to complete the book, Hylick and Moore said they drew from numerous interviews Johnson had done, both before and after the Hidden Figures film release. This book is more of a personal family story.” Of the numerous awards she received, Johnson writes, “If I’ve done anything in my life to deserve any of this, it is because I had great parents who taught me simple but powerful lessons that sustained me in the most challenging times.” They all completed high school and college at West Virginia State (College) University. Asked in an interview why it was important to share her life story in her own words, Johnson’s daughters Hylick and Moore said, “She really wanted to pay tribute to her parents, who had sacrificed so much to educate her and her siblings. Johnson began working on the book about a year before she passed away.
Of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2017 from President Barack Obama, Johnson writes that it was “one of the greatest honors of my life,” though she wished that her fellow NASA coworkers, Dorothy Vaughan, who supervised the “West Computers,” the segregated section of Black women mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center, and Eunice Smith and Mary Jackson, had lived long enough to enjoy similar public acclaim. And I felt blessed to be her,” she writes. It was enough for me that I knew when he needed ‘the girl’ to boost his confidence that he could entrust his life to the heavens and get him back home, I was that girl. Who knows? It didn’t matter to me then, and it doesn’t now. “Many have asked me over the years whether John Glenn ever knew my name. Of the results of her efforts, Johnson took pride in having played a key role. The computer had figured it out, but I was the error checker, the last stop.” So I quickly assembled my meager supplies and got busy on my calculator, working out every equation by hand for the trajectory of a mission that was scheduled to include three orbits. “This was a major assignment, but I had done this long before the computer made it seem simple. Of watching the Friendship 7 launch in February 1962, in which John Glenn had insisted that Johnson approve the calculations before the flight (instructing, “get the girl to check the numbers”), Johnson writes the task took a day and a half.