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Katherine Johnson was born in Sulphur,West Virginia. she was the youngest of four children
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Johnson showed mathematical abilities at an early age. At 10 she attended a high school on the campus of West Virginia College.
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Katherine graduated from high school at the age 14.
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Johnson graduated from West Virginia State at 18 with the highest honors
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After graduating from college she took a teaching job at a black public school in Marion,Virginia
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Katherine married her first husband James Global
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Katherine left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program she was one of the first African-American woman to attend a graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown
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After one year Johnson quit the program after she became pregnant to focus more on her family.
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She returned to teaching after her three daughters got older
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NASA rejected her the first time she applied.
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In 1952 a relative told her about an opening position at the all-black West Area Computing section at the NACA’s Langley laboratory headed by Dorothy Vaughn.
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Katherine and her husband decided to move their family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, she began working at Langley in the summer of 1953
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This position for Katherine became permanent.She spent the next four years analyzing data from the flight test and worked on a investigation on a plane crash caused by wake turbulence.
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As she was wrapping up her project her husband James Globle died of cancer.
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Katherine remarried to her second husband James Johnson in 1959
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Katherine and Ted Skopinski coauthored “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position”.It was the first time a woman of the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.
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NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work she was most known for. Glenn’s flight was an success.
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She helped send the first men to the moon.
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She retired in 1986 after thirty three years of working at Langley.
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President Obama awarded her with Presidential Metal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
