#Katherine johnson hidden figures book movie
#Katherine johnson hidden figures book professional

At 18, she’d graduated from college, earning a degree in mathematics from West Virginia State College.īut as a woman, and especially as a woman of color, Johnson’s schooling and professional life were fraught with barriers. “I loved to learn so much that going to school alone wasn’t enough.”īy age 10, Johnson was in high school.

They followed me everywhere … that was just the way my mind worked,” she wrote in her 2019 autobiography, Reaching for the Moon. By age four, she could spell and multiply, and she counted everything she could quantify. Women could not vote, and racial discrimination was legal, systemic, and rampant.Īs a child, Johnson displayed a natural aptitude for learning. World War I raged on, Woodrow Wilson was in his second term as president of the United States, and the Cold War-fueled space race was still decades away. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918. “I truly loved going to work every single day.” A lifelong passion for numbers “Quietly the quality of my contribution began to outweigh the arbitrary laws of racial segregation and the dictates that held back my gender,” Johnson wrote of her early days working as a computer.

#Katherine johnson hidden figures book movie

Telling the story of NASA’s “computers”-the women who quite literally plotted and computed aeronautical and astronautical trajectories-the book and a subsequent Oscar-nominated movie launched Johnson into the international spotlight when she was in her mid-90s. But like the other black women who worked for NASA at the time, Johnson remained mostly unknown outside of the space agency-until 2016, when Margot Lee Shetterly published the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. Her exquisite facility with analytic geometry formed the foundation for NASA’s most daring space missions of the 1960s, including the first crewed flights to the moon. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach,” Barack Obama said when he awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.įor decades, Johnson, an African-American woman, was among NASA’s largely uncelebrated pioneers. Katherine Johnson, the stereotype-shattering mathematician whose calculations helped sling NASA astronauts into space, died February 24 at age 101.