Katherine Johnson Research Paper

My name is Katherine, Katherine Johnson. An educated African- American girl with dark curly hair, big brown eyes and a bright future. I was born in 1918 in a small, yet beautiful town called White Sulfur Springs in West Virginia. As a young girl, I was absorbed by numbers, I counted everything. I counted my steps as I walked, I counted the steps outside of my church, and I counted the dishes and silverware as I washed them. I counted any and everything that could be counted. To my parents and peers, I was perceived as smart, elegant, bold, ambitious, and lastly a mathematician. My father drove my family and I 12o miles from home to Institute, West Virginia where I could finish my education from eighth grade all the way through college. It turned out my father made the right decision. By the time I was 10, I was a high school freshman which was prodigious for being an African- American female of my time. I skipped through grade levels enabling me to graduate high school at 14 years old, and from college at 18. I graduated from West Virginia State University.

For some reason, NACA had made an unusual decision to hire women for the tedious work of measuring and calculating the results of wind tunnel tests on aircrafts in 1935. The other women in my workforce and I became known as “computers”. During World War II, the NACA developed its effort to introduce African-American women in their facility. The NACA was so impressed with the results that they kept the female computers at work after the war, Which many organizations would never do. By 1953 the interest of early space research meant there were job openings for African-American computers at Langley Research Center’s Guidance and Navigation Department. That day, I knew I found the perfect place to put my extraordinary mathematical skills to