Katherine Johnson - NASA Physicist
Ms Katherine Johnson is a truly inspiring figure for all, her achievement in aerodynamics are groundbreaking, and she has helped enormously with gender and race stereotypes. Her notoriety lead to many awards in her field and eventually mainstream recognition through a major Hollywood production called "Hidden Figures", a story about Katherine Johnson and her two colleagues at Nasa, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.
Ms Johnson is an African-American physicist and mathematician who made contributions to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA which cumulated to launching a man into space.
Ms Johnson was born Katherine Coleman, in 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman and worked at the Greenbrier Hotel. Her mother was a former teacher. She had shown a talent for math from an early age, graduated from high school at 14 and finished a degree in Math and French at 18. She started her career as a teacher and took a break to focus on family. When she returned to her career, she focused on being a research mathematician, however only found positions in academia. It was not until 1952, aged 34 that she caught her break and landed a position within the branches of NASA.
Here is a trailer for her movie, Hidden Figures, which also won an Academy Award for best motion picture. Rated PG.
credit: 20th Century Fox
