Thirty Log Cabins

 

If she’d been born only a generation or two earlier, Katherine Johnson probably wouldn’t have been taught to read or write, much less to multiply and divide. Even in the 1920’s in Greenbriar County, West Virginia, African Americans like Katherine could only receive an eighth-grade education. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Institute, West Virginia so Katherine and her three siblings could continue learning. She finished high school at age fourteen. Katherine graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia State College (a historically black school) with degrees in mathematics and French, at eighteen. Katherine began working for NASA in 1952, in a pool of African American female mathematicians. In 1961, she calculated the trajectory of man’s first trip into space. She helped the crew of Apollo 13 find their way home. Her work was so consistent when NASA began to use computers, they had Katherine double-check their results for accuracy.