She Will Be Missed.

 We got to know a bit about her from a movie on three women whose contributions to the space program were not really praised until the attitude of the country changed to accept both women and African American women as able to do the same work as men.

Her name is Katherine Johnson who just died at the age of 101.  She began her career with the National Advisory Committee for Space in 1953 at the Langley Labs in Virginia before it became NASA.  We learned about her in the movie "Hidden Figures".

She provided calculations that helped sync Apollo's Lunar Lander with the Command module that circled the moon.  She helped put men on the moon in 1969 with her mathematics.  She also became the first to have her name listed as a coauthor on a research report containing her calculations for space flight.

The scene where she helps calculate Alan Shepards space flight and where she is asked to double check the computers calculation for John Glen's flight before he was willing to go on the trip are all true.  She worked for NASA until she retired in 1986.

Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia in 1918 but she skipped several grades due to her ability with numbers before beginning high school at the age of 13.  She attended the high school sharing the same campus as West Virginia State College for African Americans and when she was 18, she began an undergraduate program there.

She managed to find a mentor in W.W. Schieffelin Claytor who was the first African American to publish his material in a mathematics journal and the third person to obtain a pHd in Mathematics.  Katherine Johnson graduated in 1937 with the highest honors she could in math and French before finding a job as a high school teacher in one of the segregated school in Virginia.

Although she was offered the opportunity to enroll in a graduate mathematics program at West Virginia University in 1939, she turned it down to marry and start a family.  She was honored by the invitation because she was the only woman of three African Americans who'd been invited to the predominantly white college.

She returned to teaching when her children were older and in 1952 she heard about jobs opening up at the West Computing section of the National Advisory Committee for Space.  She, her husband and family moved there where she secured a position as a temporary that turned into a permanent position.  Her husband, James Gobel died of cancer in 1956 and she remarried Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson in 1959.

She continued working for NASA until she retired in 1986 but she wasn't forgotten.  She received the medal of Freedom in 2015 and just last year she cut the ribbon on a new facility named after her.  Monday, I heard the news she had passed on.  I didn't realize she was still alive when I saw hidden figures and so this took me by surprise.

I actually have a degree in mathematics and I am proud of it because I am one of two women who were in the program. I didn't know of any women who contributed to the world as we know it. It is only as time passes I learn more about women who contributed to the field of mathematics because even now they are not as well known as men but they are slowly becoming more visible.

I thank all these women who made it possible for me to go into mathematics. They opened the doors for me and all the other women who chose to enter this field.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.