NASA’s legendary mathematician Katherine Johnson passes away

WASHINGTON: NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose calculations facilitated get the first Americans to space and back safely, died at the age of 101.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter “Our NASA family is sad to learn the news that Katherine Johnson passed away this morning at 101 years old,” “She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten.”

Today, our Nation lost a Great American Space pioneer, the original #HiddenFigure, Katherine G. Johnson. In the face of adversity & racial discrimination, she made incalculable contributions to America’s Space program and pushed the frontier of human knowledge by her brilliance. pic.twitter.com/ca6p0t4sRZ

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) February 24, 2020

Former US President Barack Obama presented Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country, in 2015.

“She’s one of the greatest minds ever to grace our agency or our country,” then NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said when Johnson was presented the presidential medal.

Johnson and her black colleagues at the fledgling NASA were known as “computers” when that term was used not for a programmed electronic device but for a person who did computations.

After a lifetime of reaching for the stars, today, Katherine Johnson landed among them. She spent decades as a hidden figure, breaking barriers behind the scenes. But by the end of her life, she had become a hero to millions—including Michelle and me. pic.twitter.com/isG29nwBiB

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 24, 2020

Among her many accomplishments, she completed the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital flight, which was the first time the US sent a human into space.

Johnson’s work over 33 years propelled many of America’s breakthroughs in space exploration, including Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” on the Moon in 1969. But the contributions she made weren’t recognized until the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” that told the stories of three black women who worked at NASA.

Johnson retired from NASA in 1986. In 2016, NASA named a research facility for Johnson in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia, and a year later her alma mater, West Virginia State, marked her 100th birthday in August 2018 by establishing a scholarship in her name and erecting a statue.