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Katherine Johnson Biography

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Mathematician and computer scientist, Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia to Joylette and Joshua Coleman. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a farmer and janitor. She was a bright child gifted when it came to numbers. She breezed through her classes and finished eighth grade by the age of ten. Since the town did not offer high school classes for African American students, her father moved the family to Institute, West Virginia, which was 125 miles from the school that they attended. ( ).
While Katherine was enrolled in West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia, she worked with Dr. William W. Schieffelin Claytor, who was the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. He was determined to prepare Johnson to become a research mathematician. During that time, Dr. William W. Schieffelin Claytor created a special course in …show more content…
In addition, she had earned degrees from SUNY Farmingdale, Maryland's Capitol College, Virginia's Old Dominion University, and West Virginia University.
In November of 2015, Johnson received the Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. “I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.” said Katherine Johnson when receiving the Medal of Freedom. The year after NASA opened a new $30 million, 40,000-square-foot Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at Langley.
In 2016 the story of Katherine G Johnson and her fellow African American colleagues was published in Margot Lee Shetterly`s, Hidden Figures. This book was turned into a film of the same name released in

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