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Katherine Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

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When Katherine was a child she breezed through her classes and completed the eighth grade by age 10.

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Although her town didn’t offer classes for African Americans after that point, her father, Joshua, drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where they lived while she attended high school. It was a public high school.

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Katherine and her dad driving to Institute,West Virginia

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Katherine and her dad driving to Institute,West Virginia

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Katherine Johnson was 14 when she graduated high school.

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Katherine was 18 when she graduated college.

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In 1937, at age 18, Coleman graduated with highest honours from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French.

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In 1939 Katherine Johnson was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University, at Morgantown.

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In 1952, Johnson learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring African American women to serve as "computers;" namely, people who performed and checked calculations for technological developments.

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In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers.

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During this time, NACA was segregated, and the West Computers had to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities. That changed in 1958 when NACA was incorporated into the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which banned segregation.

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The West Computers were segregated from the space agency’s white workers. They were forced to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities. That changed when NACA became NASA in 1958.

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For Katherine Johnson, calculating space flight came down to the basics of geometry: "The early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point," she said. "Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start.

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I said, 'Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off .' " As a result, the task of plotting the path for Alan Shepard's 1961 journey to space, the first in American history, fell on her shoulders.

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While the work of electronic computers took on increased importance at NASA, Johnson remained highly valuable for her unwavering accuracy.

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She performed calculations for the historic 1969 Apollo 11 trip to the moon, and the following year, when Apollo 13 experienced a malfunction in space, her contributions to contingency procedures helped ensure its safe return.

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In 2015 she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of 17 Americans so honored on November 24, 2015. She was cited as a pioneering example of African-American women in STEM.

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Katherine Johnson died at a retirement home in Newport News on February 24, 2020, at age 101. Following her death, Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, described her as "an American hero" and stated that "her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten."

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Katherine Johnson was a part of history that America will never forget. America will forever have her in our hearts.