![]() She was ten years old at the time and graduated at fourteen. They spent the school years in Institute and the summers in White Sulphur Springs. Their county didn’t offer public schooling for African-Americans past grade eight and so her father took the family the 130 miles (210 km) to Institute, West Virginia where she could attend high school. She enjoyed counting everything and had a gift for numbers. Due to her mother’s influence, she could read at the age of four. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, handyman and worked at a hotel. She was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. She also has a building named after her at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Her calculations played a part in much of early spaceflight and in 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. So who is this woman who played an important but largely unknown part of such a well-known historical event? During her long life, she was a wife, a mother, an African-American, a teacher, and a human computer, a term rarely used these days. Glenn wasn’t sitting on the launchpad at the time, but during the weeks prior to launch, he did insist that Johnson double-check the computer’s calculations. ![]() While that’s the dramatic version of events given in the recent movie, Hidden Figures, the reality isn’t very far off. But first, he insisted that Katherine Johnson double-check the electronic computer’s trajectory calculations. ![]() In 1962, John Glenn sat in his capsule waiting for his rocket engines to light-up and lift him to space. ![]()
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