An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 6/13/2020
"Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off."
If you've seen the recent biopic "Hidden Figures," then you know something of this amazing lady's life and legacy. A mathematics prodigy by any standard (she made it to high school by the age of 10), it goes without saying that she had to overcome a LOT of preconceived notions throughout her career.
NASA (or more properly its precursor, NACA) found a home for Katherine amongst the so-called West Computers, a team of black women who literally calculated ballistics and trajectories for the fledgling space program --among other things putting the first Mercury capsule into space. And yet in spite of this singular brilliance, Johnson and her West Computer colleagues still found themselves segregated into separate bathrooms and dining facilities.
Such was Johnson's reputation that John Glenn would famously insist that she re-check a computer's calculations (!) before being willing to climb aboard Friendship 7. Katherine Johnson remained involved with the U.S. space program through the Apollo era and all the way into the Space Shuttle era, and --as the joke goes-- remained a badass mathematician to the very end (February of this year), waiting until age 101 so she could die in her... prime. [grin]
Next page - Lesson 7: Mae Jemison