KATHERINE JOHNSON

Katherine Coleman was born in West Virginia in 1918 and counted everything — steps, dishes, stars. She finished high school at fourteen and graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia State at eighteen, having exhausted the mathematics curriculum so completely that a professor added courses for her alone. In 1939 she was among the first Black students to integrate West Virginia University's graduate school.

In 1953 she joined the segregated West Area Computing unit at Langley, a pool of Black women doing the mathematics by hand. She pushed her way into the all-male editorial briefings, asked why she couldn't attend, and kept asking until she could. She co-authored a 1960 report on orbital trajectories — the division's first paper credited to a woman.

She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 flight. When electronic computers were assigned Friendship 7's orbital equations in 1962, John Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl" to check the machine's output by hand and said he would go if she confirmed it. She did; he flew.

She worked on Apollo, including the lunar module's rendezvous with the command module and the Apollo 13 return, and on the Space Shuttle programme, retiring in 1986. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and died in 2020, aged 101.