“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.”

“I counted everything,” she recalled near the end of her life. But it was clear from an early age that Johnson was special. She grew up in a modest household with three older siblings and a mother, Joylette Coleman, who was a school teacher and a father, Joshua Coleman, who was a farmer. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. NASA Johnson’s complex calculations were instrumental in many of NASA’s successful space missions, including the 1969 moon landing.īefore Katherine Johnson became one of NASA’s most valuable mathematicians and earned the nickname “Human Computer,” she was born Creola Katherine Coleman on Aug.

“I Counted Everything”: Katherine Johnson’s Early Life By the time she ultimately passed away at the age of 101 in February 2020, her deserved place in history was secure. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom and her work was immortalized in the Academy Award-nominated film Hidden Figures the following year. Yet, for most of her career, these accomplishments went largely ignored.Īs a black female scientist in a white man’s world, Johnson worked tirelessly and often thanklessly to make calculations that put some of history’s first astronauts into space - while facing bigotry from all sides.īut in the decades following her retirement, Johnson’s legacy of peerless perseverance and intelligence gradually received the recognition it always warranted. Starting in the 1950s, her invaluable mathematical calculations had helped push NASA’s space exploration to untold heights. When Katherine Johnson retired from NASA in 1986, she capped off an astonishing career as one of the most invaluable “computers” in the history of the agency. NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images Katherine Johnson at her desk while working for NASA in 1962.

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