98-Year-Old NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson: ‘If You Like What You’re Doing, You Will Do Well’ |
98-Year-Old NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson: ‘If You Like What You’re Doing, You Will Do Well’
People
2016-11-04
Katherine Johnson thinks all of her accomplishments over the 98 years she’s been alive are “ordinary.”
But to the rest of the world, they’re anything but.
Johnson, a physicist, space scientist and mathematician graduated from high school at 14-years-old, attended college the very next year and was the first African-American woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University…
…In 1953, after years of being a teacher, she began working for NASA where she was nicknamed the “human computer.”
Johnson was able to calculate the trajectory for numerous space missions, including for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space and the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon…
Read the entire interview here.
Tags: Caitlin Keating, Katherine Johnson, NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, PEOPLE, People Magazine