‘Hidden Figure’, Katherine Johnson dies
Katherine Johnson, the African American mathematician whose work
for NASA in the 1960s was portrayed in the film Hidden Figures, died on 24 February
2020, aged 101. Johnson was a
human computer, performing the many calculations needed to work out the trajectories for
human spaceflight.
Johnson worked for NASA for over three decades, helping
to calculate the flightpath of
Apollo 11 and many other missions. Her work was so accurate that astronaut John
Glenn – the first American to orbit the Earth – refused to fly
until Johnson had checked the
calculations. In 2015, President
Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.
“Ms Johnson helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of colour in the universal human quest to explore space,” says Jim Bridenstine, NASA’s current administrator. “At
NASA we will never forget her courage and leadership and the milestones we could not have reached without her.” www.nasa.gov