A Girl Who Counted Everything
Katherine Coleman was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, and by her own account counted everything within reach: steps to the road, dishes, stars. Her county offered no schooling for Black children beyond the eighth grade, so her father moved the family more than a hundred miles each academic year so his children could attend high school in Institute. She finished at fourteen and entered West Virginia State College, graduating summa cum laude at eighteen. Her teachers advanced her repeatedly, and she rarely sat beside children her own age.
There she met W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, one of the first African Americans to hold a doctorate in mathematics, who added courses to the curriculum specifically because he judged that she would need them for research. In 1939 she was one of three Black students selected to integrate the graduate school of West Virginia University, and the first woman among them. She left after a year to start a family and taught school for more than a decade before the chance to compute arrived.
The West Area Computers
In 1953 she joined the Langley laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, assigned to the West Area computing unit, a pool of Black women mathematicians supervised by Dorothy Vaughan. Segregation was written into the working day, from dining tables to lavatories, and the engineers upstairs received results without much interest in who had produced them. Johnson's method was to ask questions and keep asking until she was allowed into the editorial meetings where the reasons behind the numbers were discussed.
That persistence produced authorship. In 1960 she and Ted Skopinski published a report deriving the equations for placing a satellite over a chosen point on the Earth, and she was the first woman in her division to be credited as an author of such a document. She was clear afterwards that the achievement belonged to a group. The women of the pool, including Mary Jackson and Vaughan, moved into engineering and programming roles that the institution had not planned to offer them.
Trajectories
Johnson computed the trajectory for Alan Shepard's suborbital flight in 1961. When John Glenn prepared to orbit the Earth the following year, the calculations came from an IBM 7090 that the astronauts did not yet trust, and Glenn asked the engineers to have the numbers verified by hand. The request named her. She spent days reproducing the machine's output on a desk calculator and confirmed it, and the flight proceeded. Her later work covered the lunar orbit rendezvous plan and the Apollo missions.
She also helped devise the backup procedures that allowed the crew of Apollo 13 to navigate home after the loss of onboard systems, and worked on the Space Shuttle and on planning for Mars. Public recognition came very late. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and the following year the book and film Hidden Figures made her name widely known, compressing and reassigning some events in the telling. She died in February 2020, aged one hundred and one.
