She chewed through the standard math courses handily and so her teachers developed a college-level course which had her as its only student. She entered school at the second grade, bypassing kindergarten and first grade entirely and then her teachers found her still so advanced that they skipped her over fifth grade as well, with the result that she entered high school at the age of ten. He only got to see them once a month when school was in session, but thought the sacrifice was worth it, especially as Katherine continually leapt with great bounds over and beyond her classmates. Her parents cared about education more than anything, and her father was willing to work in one city while the rest of the family lived in another just to ensure that she had access to a high school. She was a maestro of trajectories, NASA’s go-to mathematician for developing the equations of the country’s first ventures into space and, as could be expected, she showed genius from the start. August 26, 1918), who refused to be domineered by tradition and who, as a result, over thirty three years at NACA and NASA, made fundamental contributions to the Mercury and Apollo missions, the space shuttle, the mathematics of space flight, astronaut emergency navigation systems, satellite tracking techniques, and plans for a future Mars mission. And in a room separate even from those women was the place where the African American calculators were kept, segregated because of their race, and given brute force computational tasks because of their gender.Īll the externals spoke against sustained success for any non-white female mathematician and yet, from within that segregated room there came one person, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (b. Those calculations were handled by a small army of women who were “checked out” and “returned” to the mathematical pool as needed by the male scientists. Calculations, done almost entirely by hand, were the coursing lifeblood of the organization. Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as much as they could about the science of flight.
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