If you’ve seen the movie Hidden Figures, you probably think you know the story. You picture Taraji P. Henson sprinting across a NASA campus in heels just to find a bathroom. It’s a great scene. Cinematic? Absolutely.
But honestly, the real-life story of the woman behind the math starts way before the Space Race. It starts in a tiny town in West Virginia with a girl who literally couldn't stop counting.
When was Katherine Johnson born?
Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918.
She came into the world as Creola Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. To put that date into perspective, 1918 was the year World War I ended. It was also the year the Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping the globe.
She was the youngest of four kids. Her mom, Joylette, was a teacher, and her dad, Joshua, was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades—he was a farmer, a janitor, and a lumberman.
A childhood built on numbers
Katherine’s obsession with math wasn't something she "discovered" in a textbook. It was just how her brain worked. She’d count the steps to the road. She’d count the number of dishes she washed. She even counted the steps to the church.
Basically, if it could be quantified, Katherine was on it.
Her father saw this spark early on. Joshua Coleman used to say that his daughter was "as smart as a whip," but he knew that being a brilliant Black girl in the segregated South in the 1920s meant the deck was stacked against her.
The 120-mile move for an education
Here is the thing about White Sulphur Springs in the 1920s: they didn't offer schooling for Black children past the eighth grade.
For most families, that was the end of the line. But the Colemans weren't having it.
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Because Katherine was so advanced—she actually started second grade at age five—she was ready for high school by the time she was ten. Ten! Most kids that age are still figuring out long division, and she was ready for algebra.
To make sure their kids could actually go to school, the family moved 120 miles away to Institute, West Virginia, every single school year. They’d live there while classes were in session and move back home for the summers so Joshua could work.
College at 15 and a specialized curriculum
By the time she was 15, Katherine was enrolled at West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), an HBCU.
It was there that she met the man who would change her life: Dr. William W. Schieffelin Claytor.
Claytor was only the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. He saw something in Katherine that she maybe hadn't even fully seen in herself. He told her, "You’d make a great research mathematician."
When she asked where she’d even find a job like that, he basically told her he’d help her get there. He even created brand-new, advanced geometry classes specifically for her.
She graduated summa cum laude in 1937. She was 18 years old. She had degrees in both Mathematics and French.
The integration of West Virginia University
In 1939, Katherine became one of the first three Black students—and the only woman—to integrate the graduate school at West Virginia University.
This was a huge deal. It happened after a Supreme Court ruling (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada) forced states to provide equal graduate school opportunities. She didn’t stay to finish her doctorate, though. She met James Goble, got married, and decided to focus on starting a family. They had three daughters: Constance, Joylette, and Katherine.
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The leap to NACA (Before it was NASA)
For years, Katherine did what most educated Black women did at the time: she taught.
But in 1952, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians. Specifically, they were looking for Black women for their West Area Computing unit at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
She applied. She got the job.
In 1953, she started as a "human computer." At the time, "computer" wasn't a machine on your desk; it was a job title for people who did the grueling, complex long-form math that engineers didn't want to do.
Why her birth year matters to history
The fact that Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 means she was exactly the right age, with exactly the right experience, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.
Suddenly, the U.S. was in a panic. The Space Race was on.
Katherine moved from the segregated West Computing pool into the Flight Research Division. She didn’t just do the math; she asked "why." She asked to be in briefings. She was told women didn't usually go to those meetings.
Her response? "Is there a law?"
There wasn't. So she went.
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The John Glenn moment
The most famous story about Katherine—and the one that usually leads people to search for when she was born—is the 1962 Friendship 7 mission.
NASA had started using actual electronic computers (IBM machines) to calculate the orbital flight of John Glenn. But Glenn didn't trust the machines yet. They were glitchy.
He famously told the engineers, "Get the girl."
He meant Katherine. He wanted her to run the same numbers by hand on her desktop mechanical calculator. He said if she said the numbers were good, he was ready to go.
She did. They were. He went.
A legacy that lasted 101 years
Katherine Johnson lived to be 101. She passed away on February 24, 2020.
Throughout her career, she worked on:
- The trajectory for Alan Shepard’s 1961 flight (the first American in space).
- The 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the Moon.
- Backup navigation charts for Apollo 13 that helped save the crew.
- The Space Shuttle program.
In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was a long-overdue "thank you" from a nation that had largely forgotten—or never knew—her name for decades.
Real-world takeaways from Katherine's life
If you're looking for inspiration from Katherine's journey, here’s the "so what" of her story:
- Advocate for your own seat: She didn't wait to be invited into the room where decisions were made. She asked if it was illegal for her to be there. When the answer was no, she walked in.
- Precision is power: Her reputation wasn't built on being "nice" (though she was); it was built on being right. When you are the best at what you do, you become indispensable.
- Mentorship changes lives: Without Dr. Claytor creating those custom math classes in the 1930s, we might never have made it to the moon.
If you want to dig deeper into the math she actually used, you can look up her 1960 research report, Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position. It was the first time a woman in her division was credited as an author.
To honor her legacy today, you can support organizations like the Katherine Johnson Foundation, which focuses on STEM education for underrepresented youth. You can also visit the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, a NASA facility renamed in her honor to continue the work of ensuring flight software is flawless—just like her hand-calculated trajectories.