At a family gathering in 1952 a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians at the all-black West Area Computing section at the Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. The first jobs she found were in teaching. Johnson decided on a career as a research mathematician, although this was a difficult field for African Americans and women to enter. Johnson working as a "computer" at NASA in 1966 Johnson died at a retirement home in Newport News, Virginia on February 24, 2020, at age 101. She was a member of Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church for 50 years. "Jim" Johnson, a United States Army officer and veteran of the Korean War the pair were married for 60 years until Jim's death in March 2019 at the age of 93. In 1956, James Goble died of an inoperable brain tumor. In 1953, the Goble family moved to Newport News, Virginia, to pursue a new job opportunity. The court had ruled that states that provided public higher education to white students also had to provide it to black students, to be satisfied either by establishing black colleges and universities or by admitting black students to previously white-only universities. She was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, one of three African-American students, selected to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. They had three daughters: Constance, Joylette, and Katherine. She left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate math program, although she left the program when she became pregnant, choosing to focus on her family. In 1939, Katherine married James Francis Goble. She took on a teaching job at a black public school in Marion, Virginia. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in mathematics and French, at age 18.
Claytor added new mathematics courses just for Katherine. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African-American to receive a Ph.D. Multiple professors mentored her, including the chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had mentored Coleman throughout high school, and W. As a student, she took every math course offered by the college. Īfter graduating from high school at 14, Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State, a historically black college. Katherine skipped several grades to graduate from high school at 14 and from college at 18. Johnson was enrolled when she was ten years old:įascinated by numbers and smart to boot, for by the time she was 10 years old, she was a high school freshman – a truly amazing feat in an era when school for African-Americans normally stopped at eighth grade for those who could indulge in that luxury. This high school was on the campus of West Virginia State College (WVSC). The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Colemans arranged for their children to attend high school in Institute, West Virginia. Ĭoleman showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age.
Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman, and worked at the Greenbrier Hotel. For this she received the highest honors.Ĭreola Katherine Coleman was born on August 26, 1918, the youngest of four children, to Joylette and Joshua Colemanin in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her legacy lies not just in her indispensable support of spaceflights, including the successful Apollo 11 first manned flight to the moon, but in breaking barriers of race and gender in the fields of mathematics and science. Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars.
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Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist."
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During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks.
Katherine Johnson (born Creola Katherine Coleman Aug– February 24, 2020), also known as Katherine Goble, was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.
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