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1963: Dr. Mae Jemison, First African American Woman in Space

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1963: Dr. Mae Jemison, First African American Woman in Space

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In 1992, Dr. Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison's career as an engineer, physician, and NASA astronaut showcases the critical roles that diversity plays in advancing science and exploration.

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Dr. Mae C. Jemison worked as a General Practitioner in Los Angeles, California, before becoming a Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. After returning to the United States, Dr. Jemison applied and was selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in 1987 and became the first African American woman in space.

Quick Facts

Assigned to STS-47, Jemison carried out experiments on the effects of space motion sickness, frog fertilization in space, and bone loss during spaceflight.

Jemison has a background in both engineering and medical research. As a science mission specialist on STS-47, she was a co-investigator on the bone cell research experiment flown on the mission.

Dr. Jemison received her BA in chemical engineering and African American studies from Stanford University, and her doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University.

Biography

Mae C. Jemison

Jemison graduated high school at the age of 16 with a four-year National Achievement Scholarship. At Stanford University, she earned a BS in chemical engineering and a BA in African and Afro-American studies. After graduation, Jemison moved to New York to attend Cornell University Medical College and completed her doctorate degree in medicine in 1981.

Learn More about Mae C. Jemison

STS-47

Spacelab-J - a joint NASA and National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) mission utilizing a manned Spacelab module - conducted microgravity investigations in materials and life sciences.

Learn More

Former Astronaut Mae C. Jemison

In honor of Black History Month, we recognize the contributions of African Americans to our nation's space programs. Prior to...

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Dr. Mae C. Jemison worked as a General Practitioner in Los Angeles, California, before becoming a Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. After returning to the United States, Dr. Jemison applied and was selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in 1987 and became the first African American woman in space.

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This piece originally appeared on the Huffington Post
Mae Jemison made history in 1992 when she rocketed into orbit aboard NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor, becoming the first African-American woman to go into space. And while the physician-turned-astronaut left the space agency the following year, she hasn't abandoned her interest in spaceflight or in science more generally.

Jemison, 58, has become an outspoken proponent of diversity in science, technology, engineering and math education, arguing that it's "bulltwinky" to suggest that women and minorities aren't good enough to make it in those fields.

She doesn't just talk STEM - she lives it. Jemison is heading up the 100 Year Starship program, which aims to develop the technologies that will enable human interstellar travel. In addition, she's working as a spokesperson for Bayer's Making Science Make Sense initiative, which fosters science literacy among students through hands-on demonstrations and volunteer speakers. And she's helped publicize the results of Bayer's Facts of Science Education survey, which she hopes will help move STEM education forward.
Did you always dream of being an astronaut?
Jemison recently spoke with The Huffington Post about the origins of her interest in space, the surprising twists and turns of her career and why she'll never fulfill her dream of being a singer.

I'm going to say no, but not because of the reason you think. I always assumed I'd go into space, but I did not assume I'd have to be a crew member ... When I was growing up, during the Apollo era, I thought that by the time I was old enough to have a job like that, I'd just be a scientist working on Mars. I didn't dream I'd go to space - I assumed I would, which sounds a little arrogant, especially growing up in the '60s as a young girl, a young African-American, a person of color.
You seem hesitant to use the word 'dream.'
Why would I just assume? I just thought the universe, the world, was going to figure this out, and that women could do all these things. There was a Russian woman who went up, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. I never had doubt that women could do any of this stuff.
Growing up, who were your role models?
I think it's overused. Dreams have an ethereal quality to them, as though we don't really know we can make them happen. Some things are more concrete than that. I always dreamed I could sing like Shirley Bassey, and that's not happening, I don't have even the start of a wonderful singing voice. I can sing loud, but Shirley Bassey is wonderful. So I always assumed I had the skill set to do many different things. I think of it as, "This is what I want to do." I am careful about using that word 'dream' because it implies this is something you can't necessarily make happen. So have big thoughts, have big ambitions.

We learn from everybody, whether we call him or her a role model or not, even if that person is not a positive role model. You may learn procrastination from somebody as you're growing up. The folks who influenced me most in terms of my behavior and things like that were my parents and my schoolteachers. People that I worked with in labs, dance instructors - oh my God, the work ethic and imagination of dance instructors and social scientists. They were the ones that probably influenced me the most.
Did anyone discourage you from applying to the space program?
In terms of space, there were really cool people that went into space, but here's the thing: I would have wanted to go into space if there had never ever been anybody of any kind in space ... I knew who the women and the African-Americans that had been to space were, I knew [NASA astronaut] John Young, and certainly I was very impressed with them. But I would have applied. It didn't matter.
How did you come to work in Cambodia?
I didn't run around telling people, "I'm going to apply to be an astronaut." That's my business. Why would you share what you want to do with every ancillary person that may or may not tell you to do this? I probably got more discouragement when I worked in a Cambodian refugee camp.

In medical school, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, as the Khmer Rouge were being run out of Cambodia by the Vietnamese, there were all these refugees coming into Thailand. My medical school staffed a facility, and one of the deals was that fourth-year medical students could come. So I was in a place where there were refugees coming in, still just off the border with skirmishes going on. My mother was uncomfortable with me going into that environment - more around that, where you could see an active problem, than the astronaut program.
You left NASA in 1993. How did you feel about that transition?
As we strive for an extraordinary tomorrow, we create a better world today. As we look at building the capabilities for sustaining human travel outside the solar system we'll find solutions for some of the most pressing science and technology and cultural problems that we face on Earth today.

One of the things I think is really important is to have new experiences and talk about new experiences. What I found is, a lot of what I learned about space exploration, I look back on those technologies and I think, "Wow, they would be really great and helpful for the developing world."
Do you agree with those who say the U.S. has a STEM problem - that not enough young people are pursuing educations and careers in science, technology, engineering and math? If so, what should be done to remedy the situation?
When I left NASA, I left because I wanted to work on how to use advanced technologies on helping developing countries and sustainable technology design. That's where my past experiences blend. And it's important to have different disciplines and be wide open to thinking about the world differently.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, we have a problem with exploiting, developing the full range of talent that we have in this country, and this is particularly true in the science, math and engineering fields. It happens because many of the people in those fields don't recognize the talent of the full range of women and the full range of minorities as important.
What do you think explains the lack of diversity in STEM?
When I started with the Bayer program 20 years ago, there was less recognition of science and science careers and jobs. Over the years, if you look at the [Facts of Science Education] survey, parents and teachers recognize the importance of it, which is great. People even know the word STEM, and there was a whole phrase coined! People recognize the importance of hands-on education. It's not about just drilling and saying, "Memorize the periodic table." It's the hands-on engagement that makes the difference.

Girls do as well as, or better than, boys all the way through high school. That's fact. They go into college wanting to go into STEM fields, but graduate in lower numbers percentage-wise. The survey asked professors about this. A lot of the professors at these research universities say they recognize and consider the women the best-prepared to graduate in a STEM field. Yet they were okay with the women not graduating because they felt that maybe the women couldn't cut it, that they weren't tough enough. It was bulltwinky.

And we know it's nonsense because at Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, the president, was able to - in just five years - triple the number of women graduating in computer sciences. They changed the way the courses were taught, but they didn't make the work any less. They separated the kids who quote-unquote know computer science and try to lord it over folks, but they all had to be in the same place at the end of the year. They brought mentors and images, and guess what? It also helped males.
What advice do you have for STEM teachers?
I don't know if it's even advice, but it's a way of living: Just find the humor in stuff.

Before I started working with Bayer, I was working on a program - a camp called The Earth We Share - and it was for kids ages 12 to 16. That the rough age where it's like, "What's the role I'm going to play?" And people start looking at each other and [saying], "What am I supposed to act like?" And you see girls dropping out from wanting to be in science. But you know what? We had more girls applying than boys, and the girls ran the place. I was like, "Okay, you need to let the guys do some stuff!"
What's the best piece of advice you ever received?
I think this is the whole idea of public figures, and maybe it's because I was close enough to them to actually be a role model, they were like, "Okay, this is Dr. J's camp. I don't have to let go of my assertiveness." It was just amazing. So interesting, because the girls had no compunction about being in charge. That had to do with people's expectations and attitudes.
What are the goals of the 100 Year Starship program?
I have no single piece because each one is episodic. One that's not really great for one situation is perfect for another. But the one that I've always found helpful ... I don't know if it's even advice, but it's a way of living: Just find the humor in stuff. Stuff is really funny. You can take yourself so seriously and so dramatically. Go ahead and mope, you got one day to mope, or two days to mope. But then look for the humor in it, it's kind of funny. I'm not talking about loss and death, but some of the things where you're like, "That was just crazy" are pretty funny.

The idea behind the 100 Year Starship program is this: As we strive for an extraordinary tomorrow, we create a better world today. As we look at building the capabilities for sustaining human travel outside the solar system, we'll find solutions for some of the most pressing science and technology and cultural problems that we face on Earth today ... The further and further away from the Earth [you] travel, the more self-sufficient you have to be, and the more you have to think about the whole thing differently. When you do that, you bring other perspectives to bear.

Our proposal to DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] was, "An inclusive, audacious journey transforms life here on earth and beyond." The first word is "inclusive" and that comes from the perspective I bring. I know that we need a full range of talent across not only disciplines, but also ethnicity, gender and geography, to really deal with this. 100 Year Starship is about building a global ambition to do bigger things.
Which of your other projects are you excited about now?
They felt that maybe the women couldn't cut it, that they weren't tough enough. It was bulltwinky.

The work that I do with Bayer, I think it's really important about public-private partnerships - corporations going in not just to sell their product, but also to support the next generation of scientists. I wouldn't be here without my third-grade science teacher or my sixth-grade teacher. They both had the latitude to let me do different things so they could keep me interested. The Thank You campaign Bayer is doing allowed me to thank Mrs. Miller, and she got to come to my launch. She was one of the people that knew I was crazy about space. It helps me as much as it helps them, to express that appreciation.

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Mae Jemison: astronaut, STEM advocate & futurist

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This piece originally appeared on the Huffington Post Mae Jemison made history in 1992 when she rocketed into orbit aboard NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor, becoming the first African-American woman to go into space. And while the physician-turned-astronaut left the space agency the following year, she hasn't abandoned her interest in spaceflight or in science more generally.

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When the space shuttle Endeavour blasted off on its second mission, it carried the first African American woman into space. But Mae Jemison is more than an astronaut - she's also a physician, a Peace Corps volunteer, a teacher, and founder and president of two technology companies. Let's take a look at this remarkable woman.

Early life

Born in Decatur, Ala., on Oct. 17, 1956, Mae Carol Jemison moved to Chicago at the age of 3 and considers the city her hometown. The youngest of three children born to a maintenance worker and an elementary schoolteacher, she had a fascination with all things science from an early age. Once, after receiving an infection, she performed an extended experiment on pus. Jemison's parents supported her desire to be a scientist.

"My parents were the best scientists I knew, because they were always asking questions," Jemison said in a 2005 press release.

Jemison did well in high school, and attended Stanford University on scholarship at the age of 16. There, she attained her bachelor of science in chemical engineering and a bachelor of arts in African and African-American studies. She went on to earn her doctorate in medicine from Cornell University in 1981. [ Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts]

After working as a general practitioner, Jemison served two and a half years as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, spending time in the African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. In addition to English, she speaks Russian, Japanese and Swahili.

(Image credit: NASA)

Reaching the stars

Although employed as a general practitioner again following her return to the United States, Jemison decided to pursue a childhood dream. After the historic flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, Jemison applied to NASA's astronaut program, feeling that more opportunities had opened up. The explosion of the Challenger shuttle put a hold on applicants, but in 1987, she became one of the 15 candidates selected out of more than 2,000 people. After a year of training, she became the first female African American astronaut. [ Infographic: NASA's Space Shuttle - From Top to Bottom]

(Image credit: NASA)

On Sept. 12, 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African American woman in space when the space shuttle Endeavour carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A mission specialist, Jemison was a co-investigator of two bone cell research experiments, one of 43 scientific investigations that were done on mission STS-47. The shuttle landed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 20. Over the course of her only space voyage, Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes, and 23 seconds in space.

Jemison left NASA in March 1993. She went on to teach at Dartmouth College. She also founded her own company, the Jemison Group, which seeks to encourage a love of science in students and bring advanced technology to schools around the world. She is a strong advocate for science and established an international science camp for high school students.

She has also taken over leadership of the 100-Year Starship program established by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The project works to make human space travel beyond the solar system a reality within the next century - but in a way that includes and benefits as many people on Earth as possible.

Quotes from Mae Jemison

"The thing that I have done throughout my life is to do the best job that I can and to be me." - Ebony Magazine, October 1987

"Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations...If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out ... You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself." - At the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students, November 2009
Additional Resources: This article was updated on Oct. 4, 2018 by Space.com Senior Writer, Meghan Bartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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When the space shuttle Endeavour blasted off on its second mission, it carried the first African American woman into space. But Mae Jemison is more than an astronaut - she's also a physician, a Peace Corps volunteer, a teacher, and founder and president of two technology companies.

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1950: Alan Turing - The Father of Computer Science

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1950: Alan Turing - The Father of Computer Science

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Alan Turing, a mathematician and logician, laid the groundwork for modern computing and artificial intelligence with his Turing machine concept in the 1950s. Turing's contributions to computer science were invaluable, and his legacy continues to influence the field today. Turing, as a gay man, faced significant challenges in his life due to his sexuality, highlighting the importance of inclusivity in STEM fields.

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1967: Katherine Johnson - The Human Computer

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1967: Katherine Johnson - The Human Computer

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Katherine Johnson, a mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first U.S. crewed spaceflights, became known as "the human computer." Johnson's work at NASA from 1953-1986 demonstrated exceptional skill and broke racial and gender barriers within the organization.

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This amazing mathematician's code-cracking skills saved thousands of lives, and now he's featuring on the UK's new £50 note! Learning hats on, gang, let's check out some awesome Alan Turing facts...
Alan Turing facts

Who was Alan Turing?

Full name: Alan Mathison Turing
Born: 23rd June 1912
Hometown: London, England.
Occupation: Mathematician.
Died: 7th June 1954
Best known for: Creating machines that helped crack the Enigma code, and laying the foundations for modern computers and artificial intelligence!

Early life.

Alan was born in London, England, in 1912. He was a super smart kid - in fact, his teachers thought he was a genius! The trouble was, that his boarding school in Dorset mostly taught classics (ancient languages and literature) and Alan found these really dull.

Instead, Alan loved maths. He spent most of his time at school solving complex chess problems and learning advanced science all on his own.

When he was 16, Alan formed a very close friendship with a fellow pupil called Christopher. He inspired Alan to come out of his shell and work harder at school.

When Christopher tragically died a couple of years later, Alan was determined to honour his memory by devoting himself to study. So, in 1931, he headed to King's College, University of Cambridge, to study maths. Shortly after, in 1936, he moved to Princeton University in the USA to complete a PhD.

Alan took up long-distance running while he was at university - a hobby that almost led to him competing for Britain in the 1948 Olympics. Wow!

The Turing Machine.

At Princeton, Alan developed one of his most famous ideas - a universal computing machine (later called a Turing machine) that would be able to decode and perform any set of instructions.

During Alan's lifetime, the machine remained just a theory and was never actually built - but his ideas laid the groundwork for modern computing, which has transformed the world we live in!

Code-breaking brilliance.

In 1939, World War II began, and Alan joined the British government's top-secret code-breaking department at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes.

The Nazis had been using a system of scrambled messages called the Enigma Code to communicate military information. Decoding these messages could give the British a huge boost in the war efforts, as they'd get to find out what their enemies were planning!

So, Alan and fellow mathematician Gordon Welchman invented an incredible new machine called the Bombe. In total, 211 of these machines were made, and they were vital in helping codebreakers crack the Enigma code.

This gave Britain and its allies a huge advantage! By 1945, they had won the war. It's estimated that the codebreakers' efforts saved many thousands of lives!

Later life.

Alan was awarded an OBE by King George VI for his services to the country in World War II. From then on, he became very busy!

In 1946, he produced a design for the first electronic computer - the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). Later, in 1950, he also published a scientific paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In this paper, Alan asked the question of whether computers would one day be able to think, and he designed a method for judging artificial intelligence.

Alan referred to this method as the ' imitation game'. It was later named the ' Turing test ', and became hugely important to computer science!

Tragic times.

During Alan's lifetime it was illegal to be gay in the UK, and in 1952 he was convicted for having a relationship with a man. Rather than go to prison for his 'crimes', Alan agreed to have a medical treatment designed to take away his romantic desires. Sadly, his criminal record also meant that Alan lost his job.

As a result, Alan became depressed, and sadly died in 1954. Thankfully, this homophobic law was abolished in 1967, and Alan received a Royal Pardon in 2013.

Face of £50!

Now, to honour this remarkable man, who helped speed up the end of the war and whose work led to the technology we all use today, Alan is shown on the new £50 note.

Illustrations by Marek Jagucki.

What do you think of our Alan Turing facts? Let us know in the comments!

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The life of Alan Turing - for kids! - National Geographic Kids

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This mathematician's code-cracking skills saved thousands - and now he's on the UK's £50 note! Find out more with our Alan Turing facts...

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Alan Turing: Crash Course Computer Science #15

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This short biography, based on the entry for the written in 1995 for the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Biography, gives an overview of Alan Turing's life and work. It can be read as s summary of my book Alan Turing: The Enigma.

1. The Origins of Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912, the second and last child (after his brother John) of Julius Mathison and Ethel Sara Turing. The unusual name of Turing placed him in a distinctive family tree of English gentry, far from rich but determinedly upper-middle-class in the peculiar sense of the English class system. His father Julius had entered the Indian Civil Service, serving in the Madras Presidency, and had there met and married Ethel Sara Stoney. She was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras railways, who came from an Anglo-Irish family of somewhat similar social status. Although conceived in British India, most likely in the town of Chatrapur, Alan Turing was born in a nursing home in Paddington, London.
In four inadequate words Alan Turing appears now as the founder of computer science, the originator of the dominant technology of the late twentieth century, but these words were not spoken in his own lifetime, and he may yet be seen in a different light in the future. They are also words very remote from the circumstances of his birth and infancy.

The name of Turing was best known for the work of Julius' brother H. D. Turing on fly fishing, and had no connection with the scientific or academic worlds. The name of Stoney however was notable for a remote relative, the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911), today best known for his identification of the natural units of physical quantities. Possibly the engineering base of his mother's family, with its respect for applied science, had some influence, but if so it was subordinated to the demands of class, church and Empire. Certainly the elder brother John F. Turing, who became a London solicitor, showed no sign of it. Alan Turing's story was not one of family or tradition but of an isolated and autonomous mind.

Alan Turing shared with his brother a childhood rigidly determined by the demands of class and the exile in India of his parents. Until his father's retirement from India in 1926, Alan Turing and his elder brother John were fostered in various English homes where nothing encouraged expression, originality, or discovery. Science for him was an extra-curricular passion, first shown in primitive chemistry experiments. But he was given, and read, later commenting on its seminal influence, a popular book called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know.

His boyhood scientific interests were a trial to his mother whose perpetual terror was that he would not be acceptable to the English Public School. At twelve he expressed his conscious fascination with using 'the thing that is commonest in nature and with the least waste of energy,' presentiment of a life seeking freshly minted answers to fundamental questions. Despite this, he was successfully entered for Sherborne School. The headmaster soon reported: "If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School." The assessment of his establishment was almost correct.

2. Matter and Spirit
Turing's private notes on the theory of relativity showed a degree-level appreciation, yet he was almost prevented from taking the School Certificate lest he shame the school with failure. But it appears that the stimulus for effective communication and competition came only from contact with another very able youth, a year ahead of him at Sherborne, to whom Alan Turing found himself powerfully attracted in 1928. He, Christopher Morcom, gave Turing a vital period of intellectual companionship - which ended with Morcom's sudden death in February 1930.
Turing's conviction that he must now do what Morcom could not, apparently sustained him through a long crisis. For three years at least, as we know from his letters to Morcom's mother, his thoughts turned to the question of how the human mind, and Christopher's mind in particular, was embodied in matter; and whether accordingly it could be released from matter by death.

This question led him deeper into the area of twentieth century physics, first helped by A. S. Eddington's book The Nature of the Physical World, wondering whether quantum-mechanical theory affected the traditional problem of mind and matter.

As an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge from 1931, he entered a world more encouraging to free-ranging thought. His 1932 reading of the then new work of von Neumann on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped the transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry. At the same time, this was when his homosexuality became a definitive part of his identity. The special ambience of King's College gave him a first real home. His association with the so-called anti-War movement of 1933 did not develop into Marxism, nor into the pacifism of his friend and occasional lover James Atkins, then a fellow undergraduate mathematician, later musician. He was closer in thought to the liberal-left economists J. M. Keynes and A. C. Pigou. His relaxations were found not in the literary circles generally associated with the King's College homosexual milieu, but in rowing, running, and later in sailing a small boat.

Turing's progress seemed assured, A distinguished degree in 1934 followed by a Fellowship of King's College in 1935 and a Smith's Prize in 1936 for work on probability theory, and he might then have seemed on course for a successful career as a mildly eccentric King's don engaged in pure mathematics. His uniqueness of mind, however, drove him in a direction none could have foreseen.

By 1933 Turing had already introduced himself to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and so to the then arcane area of mathematical logic. Bertrand Russell had thought of logic as a solid foundation for mathematical truth, but many questions had since been raised about how truth could be captured by any formalism. In particular, in 1931 Gödel had shattered Russell's picture by showing the incompleteness of mathematics: the existence of true statements about numbers which could not be proved by the formal application of set rules of deduction. In 1935, Turing learnt from the lecture course of the Cambridge topologist M. H. A. Newman that a further question, posed by Hilbert, still lay open. It was the question of Decidability, the Entscheidungsproblem. Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable?

To answer such a question needed a definition of 'method' which would be not only precise but compelling. This is what Turing supplied. He analysed what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done 'mechanically', expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape. He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a 'definite method.' Daringly he included an argument based on the transitions between 'states of mind' of a human being performing a mental process.

3. The Turing machine
This triple correspondence between logical instructions, the action of the mind, and a machine which could in principle be embodied in a practical physical form, was Turing's definitive contribution. Having made this novel definition of what should count as a 'definite method' - in modern language, an algorithm - it was not too hard to answer Hilbert's question in the negative: no such decision procedure exists.
In April 1936 he showed his result to Newman; but at the same moment the parallel conclusion of the American logician Alonzo Church became known, and Turing was robbed of the full reward for his originality. His paper, On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, had to refer to Church's work, and was delayed until August 1936. However it was seen at the time that Turing's approach was original and different; Church relied upon an assumption internal to mathematics, rather than appealing to operations that could actually be done by real things or people in the physical world. Subsequently, the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability.

Turing worked in isolation from the powerful school of logical theory centred on Church at Princeton University, and his work emerged as that of a complete outsider. One can only speculate, but it looks as if Turing found in the concept of the Turing machine something that would satisfy the fascination with the problem of Mind that Christopher Morcom had sparked; his total originality lay in seeing the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one of physics. In this paper, as in so many aspects of his life, Turing made a bridge between the logical and the physical worlds, thought and action, which crossed conventional boundaries.

His work introduced a concept of immense practical significance: the idea of the Universal Turing Machine. The concept of 'the Turing machine' is like that of 'the formula' or 'the equation'; there is an infinity of possible Turing machines, each corresponding to a different 'definite method' or algorithm. But imagine, as Turing did, each particular algorithm written out as a set of instructions in a standard form. Then the work of interpreting the instructions and carrying them out is itself a mechanical process, and so can itself be embodied in a particular Turing machine, namely the Universal Turing machine. A Universal Turing machine can be made do what any other particular Turing machine would do, by supplying it with the standard form describing that Turing machine. One machine, for all possible tasks.

It is hard now not to think of a Turing machine as a computer program, and the mechanical task of interpreting and obeying the program as what the computer itself does. Thus, the Universal Turing Machine embodies the essential principle of the computer: a single machine which can be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program.

Additionally, the abstract Universal Turing Machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the 'stored program' concept essential to the modern computer: it embodies the crucial twentieth-century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers. But computers, in this modern sense, did not exist in 1936. Turing created these concepts out of his mathematical imagination. Only nine years later would electronic technology be tried and tested sufficiently to make it practical to transfer the logic of his ideas into actual engineering. In the meanwhile the idea lived only in his mind.

In common with other outstanding young scientists, Turing spent two years at Princeton University enrolled as a graduate student. He arrived in September 1936. On Computable Numbers... was published at the very end of 1936 and attracted some attention; by the time he left, the idea had come to the attention of the leading Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann. But Turing certainly did not shoot to fame. He worked on on algebra and number theory; on showing that his definition of computability coincided with that of Church; and on an extension of his ideas (Ordinal Logics) which provided a Ph.D. thesis.

The work on 'ordinal logics', probably his most difficult and deepest mathematical work, was an attempt to bring some kind of order to the realm of the uncomputable. This also was connected to the question of the nature of mind, as Turing's interpretation of his ideas suggested that human 'intuition' could correspond to uncomputable steps in an argument. But Turing never pursued this line of development after 1938. Instead, he was increasingly preoccupied with more immediate problems which demanded logical skills.

True to the concreteness of the Turing machine, he also spent time at Princeton making a cipher machine based on using electromagnetic relays to multiply binary numbers. Even then he saw a link from 'useless' logic to practical computation. Although not one of the political intellectuals of the 1930s, Turing followed current events and was influenced in studying ciphers by the prospect of war with Germany.

4. The Second World War

In 1938 Turing was offered a temporary post at Princeton by von Neumann but instead returned to Cambridge. He had no University lectureship; in the year 1938-9 he lived on his King's College fellowship, as logician and number theorist. Unusually for a mathematician, he joined in Wittgenstein's classes on the philosophy of mathematics; unusually again, he engineered gear-wheel parts for a special machine to calculate the Riemann Zeta-function.

Publicly, he sponsored the entry into Britain of a young German Jewish refugee. Secretly, he worked part-time for the British cryptanalytic department, the so-called Government Code and Cypher School. His appointment marked the first scientific input into a hitherto arts-based department. That revolution was caused by the failure of pre-scientific methods to penetrate the mechanical Enigma cipher used by Germany. No significant progress was made, however, until the gift of vital ideas and information in July 1939 from Poland, where mathematicians had been employed on the problem much earlier.

Upon British declaration of war on 3 September, Turing took up full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters, Bletchley Park. The Polish work was limited as it depended upon the very particular way the Germans had been using the Enigma. One of their ideas was embodied in a machine called a Bomba. The way forward lay in Turing's generalisation of the Polish Bombe into a far more powerful device, capable of breaking any Enigma message where a small portion of plaintext could be guessed correctly. Another Cambridge mathematican, W. G. Welchman, made an important contribution, but the critical factor was Turing's brilliant mechanisation of subtle logical deductions.

From late 1940 onwards, the Turing-Welchman Bombe made reading of Luftwaffe signals routine. In contrast, the more complex Enigma methods used in German Naval communications were generally regarded as unbreakable. Happy to work alone on a problem that defeated others, Turing cracked the system at the end of 1939, but it required the capture of further material by the Navy, and the development of sophisticated statistical processes, before regular decryption could begin in mid-1941. Turing's section 'Hut 8', which deciphered Naval and in particular U-boat messages, then became a key unit at Bletchley Park. By the end of 1941, as the United States entered the war, the battle of the Atlantic was moving towards Allied advantage. On 1 February 1942, the Atlantic U-boat Enigma machine was given an extra complication and this advantage was suddenly wiped out: nothing could be decoded and catastrophe loomed.

Besides illustrating the always razor-edge state of the war of wits, this crisis brought about a new ingredient in Alan Turing's experience: electronic technology made its first appearance at Bletchley Park as telephone engineers were pressed into an effort to gain ever higher speeds of mechanical working. As it turned out, however, the electronic engineers found themselves called upon to mechanize the breaking of the 'Fish' material: messages enciphered on the quite different system used for Hitler's strategic communications. Here again Turing's statistical ideas underlay the methods employed, though it was M. H. A. Newman who played the organising role. The conjunction of Turing's thoughts with the practicality of large-scale electronic machinery, arising from this technical U-boat Enigma change, came to have momentous consequences.

5. Emergence of the Computer

By 1942 Alan Turing was the genius loci at Bletchley Park, famous as 'Prof', shabby, nail-bitten, tie-less, sometimes halting in speech and awkward of manner, the source of many hilarious anecdotes about bicycles, gas masks, and the Home Guard; the foe of charlatans and status-seekers, relentless in long shift work with his colleagues, mostly of student age. To one of these, Joan Clarke, he proposed marriage, and was gladly accepted. But then he retracted, telling her of his homosexuality.

Turing crossed the Atlantic in November 1942, for highest-level liaison not only on the desperate U-boat Enigma crisis, but on the electronic encipherment of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill. Before his return in March 1943, logical weaknesses in the changed U-boat system had been brilliantly detected, and U-boat Enigma decryption was effectively restored for the rest of the war. With the battle of the Atlantic regained for the Allies, crisis resolved, chess champion C. H. O'D. Alexander, hitherto Turing's deputy, took charge of Hut 8.

Turing became an all-purpose consultant to the by now vast Bletchley Park operation. As such he saw the 'Fish' material cracked by the Colossus machines, brought into operation just before D-Day, demonstrating the feasibility of large-scale digital electronic technology. Turing himself devoted much time to learning electronics: ostensibly for creating his own, elegant speech secrecy system, which he effected with the aid of one assistant, Donald Bayley, at nearby Hanslope Park. But he had another and more ambitious end in view: in the last stage of the war (for his part in which he was awarded an OBE) he planned the embodiment of the Universal Turing Machine in electronic form, or in effect, invented the digital computer.

In 1944, at the invasion of Normandy that Allied control of the Atlantic allowed, Alan Turing was almost uniquely in possession of three key ideas:

his own 1936 concept of the universal machine

the potential speed and reliability of electronic technology

the inefficiency in designing different machines for different logical processes.

Combined, these ideas provided the principle, the practical means, and the motivation for the modern computer, a single machine capable of handling any programmed task. He himself was as eager as anyone in the world to bring them together, and was spurred even more by a fourth idea: that the universal machine should be able to acquire and exhibit the faculties of the human mind. Even in 1944 he spoke to Donald Bayley of 'building a brain'.
Turing was captivated by the potential of the computer he had conceived. Although his 1936 work had shown the absolute limitations of the computable, he had become fascinated by what Turing machines could do, rather than by what they could not. He had long abandoned his youthful expectations of finding free will or free spirits through quantum mechanics. His later thought was strongly determinist and atheistic in character. And by the end of the Second World War he had turned against the tentative idea that there were steps of 'intuition' in human thought corresponding to uncomputable operations. Instead, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.

For the second time, he experienced being pre-empted by a parallel American publication, in this case the EDVAC plan for an electronic computer, with Von Neumann's name attached. Nonetheless, this publication when it appeared in June 1945 worked in practice to Turing's advantage, American competition stimulating the National Physical Laboratory to plan a rival project, to which he was appointed a Senior Principal Scientific Officer. Turing despised his nominal superior J. Womersley, but at least initially this applied mathematician showed a rapid appreciation of the scope of Turing's ideas, and with a eye for acronyms steered Turing's design towards formal approval in early 1946 as the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE.

6. Building a Brain

Turing's detailed computer scheme was drawn up in a continuation of wartime spirit: as a plan that could be effected immediately with the memory storage (cumbersome acoustic delay lines, as used in radar) that was to hand. Turing knew that superior technology would soon transform design: his emphasis was on speed in every sense, and in the exploitation of the universal machine concept. This meant, in particular, implementing arithmetical functions by programming rather than by building in electronic components, a concept different from that of the American-derived designs.

The hardware design was short-term; but his prospectus for the use of the machine was visionary. Turing projected a computer able to switch at will from numerical work to algebra, codebreaking, file handling, or chess-playing. Methods for handling subroutines included a suggestion that the machine could expand its own programs from an abbreviated form, ideas well ahead of contemporary American plans. A later talk (February 1947) depicted a national computer centre with remote terminals, and the prospect of the machine taking over more and more of its own programming work. In 1947 his Abbreviated Code Instructions marked the beginning of programming languages. But not a single component of the ACE was assembled, and Turing found himself without any influence in the engineering of the project. The lack of cooperation, very different from the wartime spirit, he found deeply frustrating.

From October 1947, the NPL allowed, or perhaps preferred, that he should spend the academic year at Cambridge. Rather than publish these fundamental principles of computing, he spent his time on new study amidst the post-war renaissance of science, not in mathematics or technology but in neurology and physiology. Out of this came a pioneering paper on what would now be called neural nets, written to amplify his earlier suggestions that a sufficiently complex mechanical system could exhibit learning ability. This was submitted to the NPL as an internal report, and never published in his lifetime. Meanwhile the NPL made no advance with the construction of the ACE, and as Turing's position fell back, other computer projects at Cambridge and Manchester took the lead.

Indeed it was Newman, who had been the first reader of On computable numbers, and in charge of the electronic breaking of the 'Fish' ciphers, who was partly responsible for this. On his 1945 appointment to the chair of pure mathematics at Manchester University, he had negotiated a large Royal Society grant for the construction of a computer. Newman strongly promoted Turing's principle of the stored-program computer, but unlike Turing, intended no personal involvement with engineering. He conveyed the basic principles to the leading radar engineer F. C. Williams, who had been attracted to Manchester, and the latter's brilliant innovation made possible a rapid success: Manchester in June 1948 had the world's first practical demonstration of Turing's computer principle.

Although losing in the race to implement a universal machine, and slow to communicate or compete in the game of scientific priority, Turing ran very competitively in a literal sense. After the war he developed his strength in cross-country running with frequent long-distance training and top-rank competition in amateur athletics. He would amaze his colleagues by running to scientific meetings, beating the travellers by public transport, and only an injury prevented his serious consideration for the British team in the 1948 Olympic Games.

The return to Cambridge helped Alan Turing form an agreeable circle of lasting friendships, particularly with Robin Gandy, who began at this period to develop under Turing's influence and would later inherit his mantle as a mathematical logician. Although never secretive about his sexuality, he now became more deliberately outspoken and exuberant, and all thoughts of comfort or conformity were now left behind. A mathematics student at King's College, Neville Johnson, became a lover.

7. Turing at Manchester

In May 1948, Newman offered Turing the post as Deputy Director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University. Turing accepted, resigned from the NPL, and moved in October 1948. The meaningless title reflected Turing's uncertain status. He had no control over the project whose fate was in fact determined by its sudden necessity for the British atomic bomb project. F. C. Williams had in any case built his own empire, and Newman's original plans were largely swept aside. But Turing did have a clear role to play: as the organiser of programming for the engineers' electronics.

Turing at Manchester could perhaps have led the world in software development. His partly explored ideas included the use of mathematical logic for program checking, implementing Church's logical calculus on the machine, and other ideas which, combined with his massive knowledge of combinatorial and statistical methods, could have set the agenda in computer science for years ahead. This, however, he failed to do; his work on machine-code programming at Manchester, produced only as a working manual, was limited in scope.

Instead, there followed a confused period, in which Turing hovered between new topics and old. He revisited his 1939 calculation of the Riemann zeta-function with the use of the prototype computer; he pursued the question of computability within the algebra of group theory. Out of this confused era arose, however, the most lucid and far-reaching expression of Turing's philosophy of machine and Mind, the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence which appeared in the philosophical journal Mind in 1950.

This, besides summarising the view he had developed since 1936, absorbed his first-hand experience and experiment with machinery. The wit and drama of the Turing Test has proved a lasting stimulus to later thinkers, and the paper a classic contribution to the philosophy and practice of Artificial Intelligence research. But this was essentially the end of his investigation, and despite this model of communication, supported by his radio talks, he had apparently no influence on the American foundation of Artificial Intelligence later in the 1950s.

At the same time, in 1950, there emerged a clear direction for new thought. Rather than return to classical mathematics, the novel potential of the computer still held his attention, and he became a pioneer of its personal use. For, as he settled in Manchester, buying his own first house at outlying Wilmslow, he had an entirely fresh field in view. It was what he described as the mathematical theory of morphogenesis: the theory of growth and form in biology.

Outwardly an extraordinary change of direction, for him it was a return to a fundamental problem; even in childhood he had been spotted and sketched 'watching the daisies grow'; from childhood Natural Wonders to D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form to a more recent interest in how brains grow new connections, he had sustained an interest in the biological structures so easily taken for granted, yet so complex and bizarre from the viewpoint of physics. Out of all the phenomena of life he fixed on the way asymmetry can arise out of initially symmetric conditions as first thing requiring explanation, and his answer, given without apparent reference to anyone else's work, was that it could arise from the nonlinearity of the chemical equations of reaction and diffusion. He modelled hypothetical chemical reactions on the circle and the plane, and for the repetitive numerical simulation required to test his ideas, became the first serious user of an electronic computer for mathematical research.

He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in July 1951, for the work done fifteen years before, but equal originality was on the way: his first successful work on The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis was submitted as a paper that November. Long overlooked, it was a founding paper of modern non-linear dynamical theory.

8. Alan Turing's Crisis

Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial on 31 March 1952, after the police learned of his sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. He made no serious denial or defence, instead telling everyone that he saw no wrong with his actions. He was particularly concerned to be open about his sexuality even in the hard and unsympathetic atmosphere of Manchester engineering. Rather than go to prison he accepted, for the period of a year, injections of oestrogen intended to neutralise his libido.

His work on the morphogenetic theory continued. He developed his theory of pattern formation out of instability into the realm of spherical objects, such as the Radiolaria, and also on the cylinder, as a model of plant stems. He set as a particular goal the explanation for the appearance of the Fibonacci numbers in the leaf patterns of plants - most noticeable in the close-packed spirals of sunflower heads and fir cones.

Besides this he refreshed his youthful interest in quantum physics, studying the problem of wave-function reduction in quantum mechanics, with a hint that he was considering a non-linear mechanism for it. He took a new interest in the representation of elementary particles by spinors, and in relativity theory.

A factor in his life unknown to most around him was that he had also continued to work for GCHQ, the post-war successor to Bletchley Park, on the basis of a personal connection with Alexander, now its director. But since 1948, the conditions of the Cold War, and the alliance with the United States, meant that known homosexuals had become ineligible for security clearance. Turing, now therefore excluded, spoke bitterly of this to his onetime wartime colleague, now MI6 engineer Donald Bayley, but to no other personal friends. State security also seems the likely cause of what he described as another intense crisis in March 1953, involving police searching for a visiting Norwegian who had come to see him. Concern over the foreign contacts of one acquainted with state secrets was understandable, and his holiday in Greece in 1953 could not have been calculated to calm the nerves of security officers.

Although unable to tell his friends about questions of official secrecy, in other ways he actively sought much greater intimacy of expression with them and with a Jungian therapist. Eccentric, solitary, gloomy, vivacious, resigned, angry, eager, dissatisfied - these had always been his ever-varying characteristics, and despite the strength that he showed the world in coping with outrageous fortune, no-one could safely have predicted his future course.

He was found by his cleaner when she came in on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. His mother believed he had accidentally ingested cyanide from his fingers after an amateur chemistry experiment, but it is more credible that he had successfully contrived his death to allow her alone to believe this. The coroner's verdict was suicide.

© Andrew Hodges, 1995

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This short biography, based on the entry for the written in 1995 for the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Biography , gives an overview of Alan Turing's life and work. It can be read as s summary of my book Alan Turing: The Enigma .

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Katherine Johnson loved to count. "I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed ... anything that could be counted, I did." And so it began for this young girl from West Virginia. Born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Johnson's love for mathematics was inherent, an inclination she had from birth. At a young age, she was ready and anxious to go to school. She could vividly remember watching her older siblings go to school and wishing so much that she could go with them. The opportunity to attend school finally did come. Johnson so excelled that she began her studies in the second grade, then moved into advanced classes. By age 10, Johnson was in high school.

Lesson: Love learning.

In school, one teacher stood out to Johnson. Miss Turner taught geometry, and Johnson couldn't wait to take her class. The teacher was a great encourager to the students and a strong mentor to many of them. Johnson did so well in her classes that she graduated early from high school, and at age 15 she entered West Virginia State College. She had two years before having to declare a major, so Johnson wavered between English, French and mathematics. One of her professors at West Virginia State College helped Johnson with her choice. She told Johnson, "If you don't show up for my class, I will come and find you." And so it was, through part threat and part joke, Johnson steered her way into what was already her first love: mathematics.

Lesson: Follow your passion.

At West Virginia State College, Johnson became immersed in academia and the mathematics program. She loved being surrounded by smart people, she said, and knew all of the professors and students on campus. One of her professors, the renowned Dr. William W. Schiefflin Claytor, recognized the bright and inquisitive mind that Johnson had. "You'd make a great research mathematician," he told her. Then professor Claytor did something else. He told Johnson that he would help her become one. Johnson said, "Many professors tell you that you'd be good at this or that, but they don't always help you with that career path. Professor Claytor made sure I was prepared to be a research mathematician." He saw that Johnson took all of the mathematics classes listed in the catalog that were needed to pursue her life's passion, and even went so far as to create a class in analytic geometry of space just for her. At age18, Johnson graduated summa cum laude with Bachelor of Science degrees in mathematics and French. Johnson recalled of her professor, "Claytor was a young professor himself, and he would walk into the room, put his hand in his pocket, and take some chalk out, and continue yesterday's lesson. But sometimes I could see that others in the class did not understand what he was teaching. So I would ask questions to help them. He'd tell me that I should know the answer, and I finally had to tell him that I did know the answer, but the other students did not. I could tell."

Lesson: Accept the help you're given, and help others when you can.

Johnson ended up teaching after college; at that time, teaching was the only option for her in her community. She left teaching to marry and start her family. When her husband fell ill in 1952, she began to teach again. And then one day, at a family function in the 1950s, a relative mentioned to Johnson that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA, was hiring. They were specifically looking for African American females to work as "computers" in what was then their Guidance and Navigation Department. In the 1950s, pools of women at NACA did calculations that the engineers needed worked or verified. Johnson immediately applied for the job, but the agency already had filled its quota for the year. By the time the next year rolled around, Johnson had applied again and found herself with two contracts on her table. One was a contract to teach, and one was to work for NACA. Remembering what professor Claytor had always told her about becoming a research mathematician, she took the job at NACA.

Lesson: Follow new leads and don't give up. Keep trying.

Johnson began working for NACA in 1953. Her work in the agency was a day-to-day progression. She started as one of the women who worked on problems assigned from the engineers in what was then the Guidance and Control Branch. As Johnson worked on the problems, she would ask questions. She didn't want to just do the work - she wanted to know the "hows" and the "whys" and then the "why nots." None of the other women had ever asked questions before, but by asking questions, Johnson began to stand out. She was told that women didn't participate in the briefings or attend meetings; she asked if there were a law against it. The answer, of course, was no, and so Johnson began to attend briefings. NACA was just beginning its work on space. Space itself may be perceived as a series of plane surfaces, and as Johnson became known for her training in geometry, she began to work with the team more and more. Eventually, she became known as a leader, and the men increasingly relied on her. She remembered quite clearly her experience at the time. "The women did what they were told to do," she explained. "They didn't ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why. They got used to me asking questions and being the only woman there." It was this inquisitive nature that made her a valuable resource to the team and the only woman at the time to ever be pulled from the computing pool to work on other programs. Then in 1962, President John F. Kennedy charged the country to send a man to the Moon. Johnson became part of the team, and she began to work on calculating the trajectory for America's first space trip with Alan Shepherd's 1961 mission, an early step toward a Moon landing. She went on to do the calculations for the first actual Moon landing in 1969.

Lesson: Go beyond the task at hand; ask questions; be inquisitive. Let yourself be heard.

Johnson worked at the agency until 1986, when she retired after 33 years of service. During her tenure at NASA, Johnson received many prestigious awards. Among them were the NASA Lunar Orbiter Award and three NASA Special Achievement Awards. She was named Mathematician of the Year in 1997 by the National Technical Association. In addition to these NASA awards, Johnson was honored with an honorary Doctor of Law degree from the State University of New York and honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Capitol College in Maryland and Old Dominion University in Virginia. At the degree ceremony in New York, Johnson discovered at the last minute that not only was she an honoree, but she was also the keynote speaker. With her esteemed career to draw upon, Johnson rose to the occasion and spoke with the audience. She referred to it as a "chat" with the graduates. A 45-year-old relative of a graduate told Johnson after the ceremony that, because of her "chat," she was returning to school the following fall to complete her degree.

Lesson: Do what you love, and love what you do.

After retirement, Johnson liked to travel, play bridge, watch sports and spend time with her family. She participated in many panels and conferences, including the NASA Trailblazers and Legends STEM Conference in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 2010. She often spoke to students about her own extraordinary career and encouraged all of them to pursue STEM careers. Johnson told them, "We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics. Everything is physics and math." Johnson served on different panels and would hear from students who told her they decided to go into a STEM career after listening to her talk. She kept in touch with NASA employees and would call on them, when needed, to help drive home the importance of STEM to audiences. In 2011, Johnson was honored at the dedication of the Katherine G. Johnson Science Technology Institute at Alpha Academy in Fayetteville, N.C.

Lesson: Pay it forward and encourage the younger generation.

When asked if she still counts things, Johnson said, "Oh, yes. And things have to be parallel. I see a picture right now that's not parallel, so I'm going to go straighten it. Things must be in order." Geometry was still an important part of who she was, a fact evident as she began to talk about her father. She recalled him as "the tallest, straightest man in the area." She loved her father a great deal, and he was a big influence in her life, teaching her many things. One lesson she carried everywhere, taught to her own children, and let be a guide throughout her education, career and every other aspect of her life.

Lesson: You are as good as anyone in this town, but you are no better than any of them.

She was a simple girl from West Virginia who loved to count. Her love of mathematics took her well beyond her small world; some could say it even took her from Earth all the way to the stars. She was a trailblazer, forging a path that would allow many others to follow in her steps. Her spirit and determination helped lead NASA into a new era, and for that the agency is grateful.

Lesson: NASA would not be what it is if not for you, Mrs. Johnson.

Katherine Johnson passed from this life on the morning of Feb. 24, 2020. She was 101 years old.

On the Web:
Video: Katherine Johnson Legacy
The Girl Who Loved to Count
NASA Dedicates Facility to Mathematician, Presidential Medal Winner
Former NASA Langley Mathematician to be Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts
Human Computers
Human Computers: Katherine Johnson
William Claytor: A Mathematical Genius

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Katherine Johnson: A Lifetime of STEM - NASA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Katherine Johnson loved to count. "I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed

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Born in the segregated south of 1918, Katherine Johnson was a trailblazer from day one. Not only was she one of the first Black students to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools, she went on to become a NASA mathematician-sending astronauts into orbit, around the Earth, and to the moon. As a Black woman in STEM, Katherine pushed boundaries, overcame adversity, and continues to inspire generations of young people to reach for the stars.

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Last Updated

October 19, 2023

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Born in the segregated south of 1918, Katherine Johnson was a trailblazer from day one. Not only was she one of the first Black students to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools, she went on to become a NASA mathematician-sending astronauts into orbit, around the Earth, and to the moon.

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NASA
Portrait of Katherine Johnson

Katherine G. Johnson was the physicist and mathematician whose calculations were critical to NASA missions sending astronauts into orbit and to the moon and whose story is chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures.

In October 1964, Johnson attended a symposium on American Women in Science and Engineering sponsored by the the MIT Association of Women Students. The informational 2-day outreach event for high school girls from 150 schools addressed students' questions about the field.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo's Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. "I loved going to work every single day," she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.
NASA

READ MORE: NASA Figures at MIT

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Katherine G. Johnson was the physicist and mathematician whose calculations were critical to NASA missions sending astronauts into orbit and to the moon and whose story is chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures . In October 1964, Johnson attended a symposium on American Women in Science and Engineering sponsored by the the MIT Association of Women Students.