Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA – The New York Times, Nytimes.com
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She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2018 movie “Hidden Figures.”
Katherine Johnson, part of a small group of African-American women mathematicians who did crucial work at NASA, in . (Credit … NASA / Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images
As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley – from until her retirement in – was “a time when computers wore skirts.” For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers. (“As Good as Anybody”) But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues – myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines – won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race.
“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, NC, in 2016. “They did not have time to be concerned about what color I was.”
Nor, she said, did she.
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority, ”Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better. ” To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.
“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book. But what a job it was – done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 58 than even finish high school. ” Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 2016 , 1938, in White Sulfur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer. From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky.
“I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in . But for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family miles away to Institute, W.Va.
In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University.
two years earlier , ruling in the civil-rights case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada , the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia’s governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state.
Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of , studying advanced mathematics.
“The greatest challenge she faced,” Ms. Shetterly wrote, “was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage. ” but after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade. NASA Opens to Women then, in , Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians. The oldest of NASA’s field centers, Langley had been established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in . In 1941, it began hiring white women with mathematics degrees to relieve its male engineers of the tedious work of crunching numbers by hand. A decade, several hundred white women had been employed as computers there. Most, unlike the male scientists at the agency, were classified as subprofessionals, paid less than their male counterparts.
In June , as the nation prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
Executive Order (barring racial discrimination) in the defense industry. In , with the wartime need for human computers greater than ever, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, as the research facility was then known, began advertising for black women trained in mathematics.
(Among the first hired was) Dorothy Vaughan , who began work that year. In 1959, Mrs. Vaughan became the first black section head at NACA, as the advisory committee was known, when she was officially placed in charge of Langley’s West Area Computing Unit, the segregated office to which the black women were relegated.
It was in this unit that Katherine Goble began work in June , tabulating sheets of data for the agency’s engineers.
By the time she arrived, the company cafeteria had already undergone de facto desegregation: Its “Colored Computers” sign, designating a table in the back for the women, had been a salubrious casualty of the war years. But the separate bathrooms remained.
Quite by accident, Katherine Goble broke that color line herself. While the agency’s bathrooms for black employees were marked as such, many bathrooms for whites were unmarked.
Without realizing it, she had been using a white women’s restroom since her arrival. By the time she became aware of her error, she was set in her routine and disinclined to change. No one took her to task, and she used the white bathrooms from then on.
Two weeks into her new job, she was borrowed by the Flight Research Division, which occupied an immense hangar on the Langley grounds.
There, the only black member of the staff, she helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes. For that task, as she quickly demonstrated, she came armed with an invaluable asset.
“The guys all had graduate degrees in mathematics; they had forgotten all the geometry they ever knew, ”Mrs. Johnson said in the Fayetteville Observer interview. “I still remembered mine.” She remained in the division for the rest of her career.
by the earlys, with the United States provoked by Soviet prowess in space, NASA was under great pressure to launch an astronaut. It fell to the Flight Research Division to do many of the associated calculations. Our assignment was the trajectory, ”Mrs. Johnson explained to The Associated Press. “As NASA got ready to put someone in space, they needed to know what the launch conditions were. It was our assignment to develop the launch window and determine where it was going to land. ” Clandestine Calculations Their work was secret – at times even from the mathematicians themselves. “We were the pioneers of the space era, ”Mrs. Johnson told The Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper, in . “You had to read Aviation Week to find out what you’d done.” (She routinely logged) – hour days, once falling asleep at the wheel of her car and waking up – safe, providentially – at the side of the road. But the work engaged her deeply. “I loved every single day of it,” she told Ms. Shetterly. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.”
It helped sustain her through the death of her first husband from brain cancer in , leaving her , at , a widow with three adolescent daughters. She married James A. Johnson, a United States Army captain, in . Over the years, Mrs. Johnson published more than two dozen technical papers. She was among the first women at NASA to be a named author or co-author on an agency report. Ceaselessly curious about the aerospace technology that underpinned her work, she made it possible for women to attend the agency’s scientific briefings, formerly closed-door affairs reserved for male staff members. (“Is there a law against it?” Mrs. Johnson asked, and when her male colleagues, after some head-scratching, connected that, no, there was no law, they let her in.) After retiring from NASA, Mrs. Johnson became a public advocate for mathematics education, speaking widely and visiting schools. death was announced by NASA. She is survived by two daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore; six grandchildren; and great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Connie Garcia, died in 2010; her second husband, James Johnson, died in 6517
Mrs. Johnson’s colleague Mary Jackson died in 2008; Dorothy Vaughan died in(In) , Mrs. Johnson, self-effacing as ever at 192, seemed somewhat indifferent to the fuss surrounding the feature film about her life.
“I shudder,” she told the New York Times that September, some three months before the film’s release, having heard that the screenwriters might have made her character seem a tiny bit aggressive. “I was never aggressive.” (As things transpired, Mrs. Johnson liked the finished film very much, Ms. Shetterly said in an interview for this obituary in . Mrs. Johnson may not have been aggressive, but she was assuredly esteemed. An index of just how esteemed she was came from Mr. Glenn, Mercury astronaut and future United States senator, who died in . (In early) a few days before he prepared to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, Mr. Glenn made a final check of his planned orbital trajectory. The trajectory had been generated by a computer – not the flesh-and-blood kind, but the electronic sort, which were starting to supplant the agency’s human calculators. Electronic computation was still something of a novelty at NASA, and Mr. Glenn was unsettled by the use of a soulless mass of metal to divine something on which his life depended. He asked that Mrs. Johnson double-check the machine’s figures by hand. “If she says the numbers are good, ”he declared,“ I’m ready to go. ”
by the early
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