You may remember her as Taraji P. Henson in the lauded film Hidden Figures —Katherine Johnson’s legacy certainly deserved the Hollywood treatment. Born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson’s calculations were the talk of her small town school. She skipped several grades, finished high school by age 14, and graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University at just 18. Her degrees were in mathematics, naturally, and French. Her early passion for numbers would harden into the backbone of some of NASA’s most critical missions, even as she worked against the racism and sexism of a still segregated America.

In 1953, Johnson joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA, as a ‘computer’ — she was employed to perform complex calculations by hand. Her work soon became indispensable to the operation: she calculated flight trajectories, launch windows, and return paths for missions that would define the space race. In 1962, when astronaut John Glenn prepared to orbit the Earth, he famously requested that Johnson personally verify the trajectory calculations. It was an honour, and a rare acknowledgment of a woman’s expertise in a white and male-dominated field. Johnson’s work on the Mercury, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs directly contributed to milestones such as the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In 2015, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognising a lifetime of achievement that reshaped science, space exploration, and the possibilities for women and people of colour in STEM. Her legacy is a testament to the quiet power of intellect; a reminder that history is made not just by those in the spotlight, on the screens and stepping foot into space, but by those whose calculations and insights make what once seemed impossible, possible.