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. Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer. The next year she entered West Virginia State. Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world-renowned resort there. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.īut for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. “I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer.įrom her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.”Ĭreola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.īut what a job it was - done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. “I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.” Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010.
#Katherine johnson nasa quotes professional
“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues - myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines - won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race. “As Good as Anybody”īut over time, the work of Mrs. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley - from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 - was “a time when computers wore skirts.”įor some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.Īs Mrs. That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” - “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs. The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.
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