Smithsonian Curators Remember Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Dead at 101

DR. KATHERINE JOHNSON, PHOTOGRAPHED AT FORT MONROE, IN HAMPTON, VIRGINIA BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. VIA VANITY FAIR.

Smithsonian Curators Remember Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Dead at 101

NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who developed equations that helped the United States launch its first astronaut into space in 1961 and safely plant Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, died this morning at age 101.

Born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918—a date that now commemorates Women’s Equality Day—Johnson showed an early predilection for math. “I counted everything,” she once proclaimed. “I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

After graduating high school at age 14, Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State College with plans to pursue a career as a teacher. But her mentor, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor—who was reportedly the third African American to receive a doctorate in math—persuaded his bright young student to change fields.

In 1953, Johnson—then Katherine Goble—began work at Langley Research Center at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which later became NASA, where she would stay until her retirement in 1986. Relegated to an office marked “Colored Computers,” Johnson spent her first five years at NACA dealing with a double dose of segregation. Along with the agency’s other female African American mathematicians, she worked in quarters separated from a much larger pool of white women “computers,” who were in turn kept away from their male colleagues.

But Johnson’s consignment did little to hold her back. “I didn't have time for that,” she told NASA in an interview from her home in Hampton, Virginia in 2008. “My dad taught us, ‘You are as good as anybody in this town, but you're no better.’ I don't have a feeling of inferiority. Never had.”