50 Fun Facts About Katherine Johnson

Which 1957 Soviet launch pulled Johnson's flight research team into the new field of spaceflight?

Sputnik redirected her career: the engineers she worked with became the core of America's first space team, and with no textbook on spaceflight to consult, they wrote their own.

Which astronaut refused to fly unless Johnson personally verified the computer's numbers for his orbit?

John Glenn told engineers to "get the girl" and have her rerun the orbital equations by hand; if she said the numbers were good, he said, he was ready to go.

Whose 2016 nonfiction book was the film Hidden Figures based on?

Margot Lee Shetterly knew the setting first-hand: she grew up in Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of a research scientist at Langley, where Johnson spent her career.

Who played Johnson in Hidden Figures?

Taraji P. Henson appeared alongside the real Johnson at the 2017 Oscars, where the audience rose to give the retired mathematician a standing ovation.

Which president awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour?

Barack Obama gave her the medal in November 2015, the year before the book and film Hidden Figures told her story to the wider public.

Johnson was born in which West Virginia town, home of the Greenbrier resort?

White Sulphur Springs is where her father farmed, did odd jobs and worked at the Greenbrier, and where he told his children they were as good as anybody in town, but no better.

What took Johnson's family 120 miles from home when she was ten?

A Black high school: schooling for Black children in her county ended at eighth grade, so her father drove the family to Institute each year and went back alone to keep earning.

After finishing college at 18, Johnson took her first job as what?

A schoolteacher at a Black public school in Marion, Virginia, was her start, and she was back in a classroom some fifteen years later when she learned that Langley was hiring Black women mathematicians.

A college professor created which maths course just for Johnson, one she later drew on to plot spacecraft paths?

Analytic geometry wasn't taught at her college until W. W. Schieffelin Claytor put it on for her; he had told her she would make a good research mathematician and that he would see she was prepared.

Which programming language did Johnson's first Langley supervisor master as electronic machines replaced human calculators?

FORTRAN was the supervisor's answer to the machines: when her segregated section was abolished in 1958, she joined Langley's new electronic computing division and became an expert programmer.

Johnson was one of three Black students chosen to integrate which university's graduate school?

West Virginia University opened its graduate school after a 1938 Supreme Court ruling told states to give Black students the education they offered white ones; the only woman of the three, she left after one session.

Which agency hired Johnson in 1953, five years before it was absorbed into NASA?

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had begun hiring Black women mathematicians during World War II, and a relative's tip at a family gathering sent Johnson to apply.

Who supervised the all-Black West Area unit to which Johnson was first assigned?

Dorothy Vaughan had led the unit since 1949 as the agency's first Black supervisor, and two weeks after Johnson arrived she sent her on loan to the flight researchers.

What did Miriam Mann do whenever a segregation sign appeared on her Langley cafeteria table?

Hid it in her purse: the sign marked the table set aside for the lab's Black women mathematicians, and each new one went the same way until at last nobody replaced it.

Why did Johnson's loan to flight research never end, by her account?

The male engineers "forgot to return" her, as she put it: the loan began two weeks into the job, and she spent the next four years analysing flight-test data alongside them.

What did Johnson ask to attend, where "no women had gone before"?

Editorial meetings were closed to women until she asked whether there was a law against her going; there wasn't, and the engineers let her in.

What did Johnson say she did at lunch at Langley, where she "didn't feel the segregation"?

She would play bridge at lunch, she said, at a place where everybody had a mission; the game stayed with her, and in 2016 a reporter watched her and her partner win at her apartment.

In 1960 Johnson became the first woman in her division to receive what?

Credit on a research report came only because Ted Skopinski, leaving for Houston, told their boss that Katherine should finish it, since she had done most of the work.

Whose 1961 flight, the first by an American in space, did Johnson calculate the trajectory for?

Alan Shepard's 15-minute hop was simple enough for her to run in reverse: tell her where the capsule should come down, she said, and she would tell them when to launch.

Which Mercury capsule carried the first American into space on Johnson's numbers?

Freedom 7 never circled the Earth: it flew a single arc lasting about 15 minutes and splashed down some 300 miles from the launch pad.

Where was Johnson when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?

At a meeting in the Pocono Mountains, a sorority convention, she watched on a small television with the other guests, sure of her sums but nervous that something could still go wrong.

Johnson's work on Apollo 13 backup procedures led to which method for astronauts to fix their position?

A one-star observation system lets a crew match a single star against an onboard chart to find where they are; it grew out of the scramble to plot Apollo 13's safe path home.

The Earth Resources Technology Satellite that Johnson worked on late in her career was later renamed what?

Landsat has watched the planet's land surface since 1972, and its free images now help farmers, foresters and planners decide how land and water are used.

Johnson retired in 1986, the year NASA lost which space shuttle?

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch in January 1986, a bleak start to her last year at the agency whose shuttle programme she had helped get off the ground.

Which Langley colleague of Johnson's became NASA's first Black female engineer in 1958?

Mary Jackson first had to win permission from the City of Hampton to take the required courses, because they were taught in a school reserved for white students.

What did the young Johnson say she did with the steps to church, the dishes she washed and everything else?

Counted them: "anything that could be counted, I did," she recalled, and that appetite for numbers had her skipping grades until she was years ahead of children her own age.

Which toy line released a Katherine Johnson doll, complete with NASA badge, in 2018?

Barbie made her one of the first three dolls in its Inspiring Women line, beside Amelia Earhart and Frida Kahlo, and she worked with the designers to get the face right.

Johnson called her greatest contribution the maths that let Apollo's lunar lander do what after leaving the Moon?

Rejoin the orbiting command module: if that rendezvous failed the moonwalkers had no way home, which is why she said her team worried less about getting there than about getting back.

What NASA award, often called "the astronaut's award", did Johnson receive from Leland Melvin in 2016?

The Silver Snoopy is a lapel pin that astronauts hand over in person to no more than 1 in 100 NASA workers a year, and each one has first flown in space; hers went up on the shuttle Atlantis.

What kind of building at NASA Langley was named for Johnson on the 55th anniversary of America's first human spaceflight?

A computing facility took her name because, as Langley's deputy director told the crowd, millions had watched that first flight without knowing whose calculations got the astronaut up and safely home.

Which honour was awarded to Johnson and her fellow "hidden figures" in 2019?

The Congressional Gold Medal went to four named women and, in a fifth medal, to all the women who did the agency's early maths and engineering; hers reached her family at the Capitol only in 2024.

Which toy company's Women of NASA set left Johnson out after she declined to approve her likeness?

Lego's set began as a science writer's fan design that won the 10,000 votes needed for review; it reached the shops in 2017 with four figures instead of five.

What did the United States Space Force name after Johnson in 2020?

A GPS satellite, the eighth of its generation, took her name because the programme christens each craft after an explorer or pioneer; hers reached orbit in May 2025.

Which company named its 2021 Cygnus cargo ship to the space station the SS Katherine Johnson?

Northrop Grumman names each Cygnus for someone pivotal to human spaceflight, and it launched hers 59 years to the day after the orbital flight she had checked by hand.

Which actor plays Jim Johnson, the officer who courts Katherine in Hidden Figures?

Mahershala Ali's officer was real: Jim Johnson married her in 1959, and they stayed together until his death 60 years later, in 2019.

Which institution named its SciTech campus's main building Katherine G. Johnson Hall in 2019?

West Virginia State University had put up a life-size statue of her the year before.

Which Big Bang Theory star plays Paul Stafford, the engineer who resents Johnson checking his work in Hidden Figures?

Jim Parsons was playing someone who never existed: the film invented Stafford to stand for the attitudes of the day, rather than basing him on one of her real colleagues.

Which actor played the astronaut who insisted Johnson check his numbers, in Hidden Figures?

Glen Powell's astronaut was real, but the boss played by Kevin Costner was not: the film invented Al Harrison to stand in for the space team's real managers.

Hidden Figures earned three Oscar nominations, including a supporting-actress nod for which star?

Octavia Spencer's character fights through the film for a supervisor's title; the real woman had won that rank more than a decade before the story is set.

Hidden Figures outgrossed every rival Best Picture nominee in US cinemas, including which winner?

Moonlight had earned the least of the nine nominees by Oscar night and still took Best Picture, while Hidden Figures, made for $25 million, outgrossed even La La Land at home.

Which company built the electronic computers whose 1962 orbital figures Johnson was asked to check by hand?

IBM machines in Washington, Florida and Bermuda ran the orbit's equations, but they were prone to hiccups and blackouts, so the astronaut wanted her to work the same numbers on a desk calculator.

The NASA facility in West Virginia renamed for Johnson in 2019 independently checks what before spacecraft fly?

Mission software is verified there by a team that stands apart from its developers, a fitting job for a building named after the woman once asked to double-check a computer's orbit.

What was Katherine Johnson's maiden name?

Coleman was her name until 1939, when she married James Goble, which is why the heroine of Hidden Figures is called Katherine Goble until she remarries late in the film.

In Hidden Figures Johnson runs across Langley to reach what, though the real Johnson said she never did?

A "colored" bathroom was never her destination: she said she just used the nearest one, unmarked but meant for white staff, and took no notice when someone finally complained.

How did Johnson describe the women in her section at Langley in the 1950s?

'Computers who wore skirts' stuck: NASA borrowed the phrase for the headline of the profile it ran on her 90th birthday, "She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts".

Johnson's birthday, August 26, falls on which US observance marking women's right to vote?

Women's Equality Day recalls the day in 1920 when the amendment giving women the vote was proclaimed; NASA liked the coincidence enough to open its 90th-birthday profile of her with it.

Which musician from Virginia Beach, near Langley, co-produced Hidden Figures and wrote its original songs?

Pharrell Williams said he begged to take part: the story is set in his home state, at NASA, a place he had been obsessed with since childhood.

Johnson moved her family to which Virginia shipbuilding city to chase a job at nearby Langley?

Newport News was a leap of faith: she and her husband moved their three daughters there just to pursue the opening, and the job offer followed only in June 1953.

Johnson graduated from college with degrees in mathematics and which language?

French shared her diploma with mathematics, a subject she had exhausted: she took every maths course her college offered and still finished both degrees at 18.

Which NASA administrator called Johnson 'an American hero' after her death in 2020?

Jim Bridenstine broke the news of her death himself, adding that NASA would never forget her courage or the milestones it could not have reached without her.