{"id":48794,"date":"2016-08-23T19:52:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T19:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48794"},"modified":"2016-08-24T13:58:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T13:58:54","slug":"katherine-johnson-the-nasa-mathematician-who-advanced-human-rights-with-a-slide-rule-and-pencil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48794","title":{"rendered":"Katherine Johnson, the NASA Mathematician Who Advanced Human Rights with a Slide Rule and Pencil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katherine Johnson, the NASA Mathematician Who Advanced Human Rights with a Slide Rule and Pencil<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Vanity Fair<\/a>
\nSeptember 2016<\/p>\n

Charles Bolden<\/strong><\/a>, Administrator
\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nKatherine Johnson<\/a>, photographed at Fort Monroe<\/a>, in Hampton, Virginia<\/a>.
\nPhotograph by Annie Leibovitz<\/a><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

NASA<\/a> chief Charles Bolden recalls the historic trajectory of the \u201chuman computer<\/a>\u201d who played a key role in the Apollo 11<\/a> moon landing, and as a female African-American in the 1960s, shattered stereotypes in the process.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was growing up, in segregated South Carolina<\/a>, African-American role models in national life were few and far between. Later, when my fellow flight students and I, in training at the Naval Air Station in Meridian, Mississippi<\/a>, clustered around a small television watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, little did I know that one of the key figures responsible for its success was an unassuming black woman from West Virginia<\/a>: Katherine Johnson<\/a>. Hidden Figures<\/em> is both an upcoming book<\/a> and an upcoming movie<\/a> about her incredible life, and, as the title suggests, Katherine worked behind the scenes but with incredible impact…<\/p>\n

..\u201cIn math, you\u2019re either right or you\u2019re wrong,\u201d she said. Her succinct words belie a deep curiosity about the world and dedication to her discipline, despite the prejudices of her time against both women and African-Americans. It was her duty to calculate orbital trajectories and flight times relative to the position of the moon\u2014you know, simple things. In this day and age, when we increasingly rely on technology, it\u2019s hard to believe that John Glenn<\/a> himself tasked Katherine to double-check the results of the computer calculations before his historic orbital flight, the first by an American. The numbers of the human computer and the machine matched.<\/p>\n

With a slide rule<\/a> and a pencil, Katherine advanced the cause of human rights and the frontier of human achievement at the same time. Having graduated from high school at 14 and college at 18 at a time when African-Americans often did not go beyond the eighth grade, she used her amazing facility with geometry to calculate Alan Shepard\u2019s flight path<\/a> and took the Apollo 11 crew to the moon to orbit it, land on it, and return safely to Earth…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katherine Johnson, the NASA Mathematician Who Advanced Human Rights with a Slide Rule and Pencil Vanity Fair September 2016 Charles Bolden, Administrator National Aeronautics and Space Administration Katherine Johnson, photographed at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz NASA chief Charles Bolden recalls the historic trajectory of the \u201chuman computer\u201d who played a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,20,25],"tags":[24835,24836,22016,19571,19572,19573,306],"class_list":["post-48794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-charles-bolden","tag-charles-frank-bolden","tag-katherine-g-johnson","tag-katherine-johnson","tag-nasa","tag-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration","tag-vanity-fair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48807,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48794\/revisions\/48807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}