Katherine Johnson
African-American mathematician · United States · Academics · Lived 1918 to 2020 · aged 101
Katherine Johnson is read about 3,046 times a day, in 68 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?She did the math that put Americans in space - by hand. Before computers were trusted, NASA trusted Katherine Johnson's calculations for trajectories, launch windows, and the paths that brought astronauts home.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
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In their own words 7
, In the cafeteria, we just ignored the sign [for segregated seating]. But at some point, we started eating at our desks.
But then we’d be back with our colleagues on the job. People are people. My father’s advice helped. He said, “You’re no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than you.
I was always interested in math. I counted everything as a child - the number of steps up the stairs, the dishes, the steps to church. Those thoughts just came naturally.
Awards
About this person
Creola Katherine Johnson was born August 26, 1918, and became one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist during a 33-year career that began at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. She mastered complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the shift to electronic computing for tasks humans once performed. Her work spanned Project Mercury - including flights for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit - through Apollo's lunar rendezvous paths, the Space Shuttle program, and plans for a Mars mission. In 2015 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Taraji P. Henson portrayed her in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Congress gave her the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019, and NASA named a facility in West Virginia for her. She died February 24, 2020, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the following year.
In common with Katherine
Academics from the United States 5
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