Although we know the outcome, there’s relief when the numbers agree. “I was the error checker, the last stop,” she writes. A depiction of performing calculations has never been so engrossing. Hollywood embellished the scene Johnson doesn’t need to. She was indeed “the girl” on whom astronaut John Glenn called to hand-check the computer’s plan for his 1962 orbit of Earth, the first by an American. The pinnacle of the book is a story that appeared on the big screen - but Johnson’s account is more gripping. Johnson’s path to NASA was as significant as the work she did there. In 1939, she and two other Black students were selected by the president of West Virginia State College, a historically Black institution, to attend the previously all-white West Virginia University in Morgantown, desegregating it nearly two decades before the Little Rock Nine did the same for a high school in Arkansas in 1957. Johnson joined the precursor to NASA - the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics - in the summer of 1953. Her life weaves through this greater tapestry, providing a deeper understanding of the past century. Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters/Alamyīorn in 1918, Johnson sat ringside to the Great Depression, the cold war and the US civil-rights movement, as well as the space race. Katherine Johnson receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 from Barack Obama. Claytor exemplified the African American adage “lift as we climb”. Unknowingly, he furnished her with the boost she needed years later. He prepared his protégé for her window of opportunity with one-on-one instruction in analytic geometry of space. William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor was a gifted topologist whose own career was later stymied by academic racism. There, her professor gave her a mission - to become a research mathematician. ![]() This lesson stabilized her trajectory.Īt 14, she entered West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) in Institute. Her father, who had his own gift for numbers, taught her that she was “equal to anyone, no matter what the laws or traditions said”. She and her three siblings moved 190 kilometres to Institute, West Virginia, to attend a school for Black pupils that went beyond primary grades. Just as a rocket thrusts a space capsule upwards, Johnson benefited from the sacrifices of her parents. Comparing orbital prediction with hunting, she writes: “You aim where you think the rabbit will be.” Family support Her down-home way of explaining science is enjoyable, too. I felt like I was sitting at the knee of a griot - a historian and storyteller - gaining years of insight into how to use idle times to prepare, to keep moving forwards when life hurts. ![]() Johnson recognizes that she is a role model, and that few women and people of colour see their reflections in the sciences. She entitles her chapters with life lessons - ‘Education Matters’, ‘Ask Brave Questions’, ‘Shoot for the Moon’. Meanwhile, she had to navigate her own path in an age when segregation and disenfranchisement were legal in the United States. At NASA, she calculated trajectories and launch windows for the Project Mercury human space-flight programme. After that, Johnson unfolds how a mathematics prodigy from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, became a ‘human computer’ for some of the most watched rocket launches in history. It begins with exuberance, describing how public recognition changed her final years, from attending the Oscars in 2017 to being honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 - and getting a kiss from president Barack Obama. ![]() Written with her daughters and an award-winning journalist, it captures Johnson’s story against the backdrop of a dramatic century of US history. My Remarkable Journey is a masterful memoir of a life well lived. Johnson, who was highlighted in the 2016 blockbuster movie Hidden Figures, died last year, aged 101. ![]() Little did society know that, as mathematicians, Black women such as Katherine Johnson actually made space flight possible. When Star Trek first aired in the 1960s, communications officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) seemed to be the only Black woman affiliated with space travel. My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir Katherine Johnson, Joylette Hylick & Katherine Moore, with Lisa Frazier Page Amistad (2021) Katherine Johnson performing calculations for space missions at NASA in 1966.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |