Wonder Woman of the Week: Katherine Johnson

The Wonder Woman this week is one of the lesser known figures key to the United States space program. Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who helped turn the tide in the Soviet-US space race eventually leading to the moon landing in the 1960's. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman in 1918 in Virginia at the height of racial segregation in the US south. As a child, Coleman showed a strong sense of mathematics that improved educators at her African-American school. After exceeding past eighth grade curriculum, Coleman's parents had to send her to school in West Virginia because their town did not have any schooling for African-American students past eighth grade. After graduating from high school at only fourteen years old, Coleman enrolled at the historically black West Virginia State college and graduated in 1937 at only eighteen years old.

Katherine Coleman then attended graduate school at the newly desegregated West Virginia University as the third African-American and first woman to attend the university's graduate program. In 1953, Coleman accepted a job at NASA's office in Langley, Virginia as a mathematician. Coleman rapidly rose through the ranks from a gust computer to enter the all white-male office of the Flight Research Division. From 1958 until her retirement in 1986, Coleman served as an aerospace technologist which included calculating the trajectory for the first American in space (Alan Shepard), plotting backup navigation charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures, and checking the mathematical results of newly implemented electronic computers. Johnson even calculated the trajectory for the Apollo 11 moon landing.