Katherine Johnson
The NASA mathematician whose calculations put Americans into orbit and on the Moon
Katherine Coleman counted everything as a child: steps, dishes, the stars. Her West Virginia county offered no schooling for Black children past the eighth grade, so her family moved 120 miles each school year so she could continue. She started university at 15 and graduated at 18 with degrees in mathematics and French.
In 1953 she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, as one of the "computers", women who did calculations by hand. The Black computers worked in a separate building with separate toilets. Johnson ignored the rules where she could, asking to attend engineering briefings that women were not invited to. Nobody could find a rule that said she couldn't, so she went.
She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, the first American in space. Before John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962 the agency had begun using electronic computers, but Glenn asked for "the girl" to run the numbers by hand before he would fly. She did, and he flew. Her work fed into Apollo 11's path to the Moon and the emergency return of Apollo 13.
She stayed at NASA until 1986 and co-authored 26 research papers. Her story was largely unknown until the book and film Hidden Figures in 2016. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and died at 101.