Asked in an interview why it was important to share her life story in her own words, Johnson’s daughters Hylick and Moore said, “She really wanted to pay tribute to her parents, who had sacrificed so much to educate her and her siblings. Johnson began working on the book about a year before she passed away. Of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2017 from President Barack Obama, Johnson writes that it was “one of the greatest honors of my life,” though she wished that her fellow NASA coworkers, Dorothy Vaughan, who supervised the “West Computers,” the segregated section of Black women mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center, and Eunice Smith and Mary Jackson, had lived long enough to enjoy similar public acclaim. And I felt blessed to be her,” she writes. It was enough for me that I knew when he needed ‘the girl’ to boost his confidence that he could entrust his life to the heavens and get him back home, I was that girl. Who knows? It didn’t matter to me then, and it doesn’t now. “Many have asked me over the years whether John Glenn ever knew my name.

Of the results of her efforts, Johnson took pride in having played a key role. The computer had figured it out, but I was the error checker, the last stop.” So I quickly assembled my meager supplies and got busy on my calculator, working out every equation by hand for the trajectory of a mission that was scheduled to include three orbits. “This was a major assignment, but I had done this long before the computer made it seem simple. Of watching the Friendship 7 launch in February 1962, in which John Glenn had insisted that Johnson approve the calculations before the flight (instructing, “get the girl to check the numbers”), Johnson writes the task took a day and a half.

Katherine johnson nasa mathemation