Katherine Johnson and the Numbers That Flew

In 1962, astronaut John Glenn was about to become the first American to orbit Earth. New IBM computers had calculated his flight path — but Glenn didn't trust the machines. 'Get the girl to check the numbers,' he said. 'If she says they're good, then I'm ready.'

'The girl' was Katherine Johnson, a Black mathematician at NASA. She had grown up in West Virginia, where segregation limited the schools she could attend. Yet she finished high school at fourteen and college at eighteen. At NASA, she calculated trajectories, launch windows, and reentry paths by hand, filling notebooks with equations most engineers couldn't follow.

When Johnson reviewed the computer's numbers, they matched hers exactly. Glenn flew. He returned safely. Decades later, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her work 'a national treasure.' She once said, 'We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always be, always be mathematics.'