The book chronicled the lives of Johnson and the other black female mathematicians who worked as “computers” at the Langley Research Center, using pencils and slide rules to calculate equations for the agency that would become NASA. For the first time, a wider swath of the world learned about Johnson and how she made a place for herself in American spaceflight. Johnson’s talent and contributions are well documented now, but for most of her life, her efforts went unrecognized-until Shetterly published her book in 2016, and the film it inspired became a blockbuster. Johnson, who died this morning at the age of 101, spent more than 30 years at NASA, where she provided the complex calculations for the country’s most important missions, from the first journey to the edge of space to the triumphant landing on the moon. She made it into the room, and well beyond that. Eventually the engineers relented, tired of saying no over and over again. There had been, in other cases one prohibited black people from using the same bathroom as white people.īut Johnson already ignored those laws at the office, and she kept asking about the meetings. “Is there a law against it?” she replied. “Girls don’t go to the meetings,” her male colleagues told her. “Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Johnson asked the engineers, as Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in the book Hidden Figures. But she wasn’t allowed inside the room where any of it was discussed. Katherine Johnson’s job was to prepare the equations and charts for this work. Every day, engineers at the Langley laboratory, in Virginia, contemplated orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion, and the complicated art of leaving Earth-they needed to catch up with the Soviet Union. In 1958, not long after the pivotal launch of Sputnik, American engineers were preoccupied with spaceflight.

Katherine johnson nasa and family