Katherine Johnson, American Mathematician

Katherine Johnson was one of the Black women portrayed in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures who worked at NASA and made the 1969 moon landing possible.

After working as a teacher in public schools, she joined NASA (then the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) as a research mathematician in the Langley laboratory’s all-Black West Area Computing section. There, she did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 Freedom 7 mission, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1962, as NASA prepared for John Glenn’s mission to orbit Earth for the first time, she used geometry for space travel and figured out the paths for liftoff to splashdown.

She continued to work for NASA, with her calculations helping to send astronauts to the Moon and back. When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, she chose her calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. In 2015, at age 97, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Source: Black Innovators in STEM Who Changed the World (osc.org)