Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.”īut after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. Shetterly wrote, “was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, studying advanced mathematics. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia’s governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state. Canada, the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. Two years earlier, ruling in the civil-rights case Missouri ex rel. In 1940, she was chosen by the president of West Virginia State to be one of three black graduate students to integrate West Virginia University, the all-white institution in Morgantown. She took a job as a schoolteacher in Marion, Va. “That,” he replied, “will be your problem.”Īfter graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a double major in mathematics and French, she found, unsurprisingly, that research opportunities for black female teenage mathematicians were negligible. “Where will I find a job?” Katherine asked. “And I am going to prepare you for this career.” “You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his 17-year-old charge. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division - the office from which the American space program sprang - and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. ![]() Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. ![]() Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.Ī single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.
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