- #Katherine johnson nasa worker how to
- #Katherine johnson nasa worker movie
- #Katherine johnson nasa worker license
But they don't have to, you know, kill my spirit. MOORE: I know what the rules say, I don't have to agree with them.
You don't have to be afraid because her father taught her, Katherine. But the minute there's an opportunity, you take it. And I think what she taught us was, you can do what you have to do and stay in your lane. MOORE: You don't rock the boat you just found another way to go around the boat.
#Katherine johnson nasa worker how to
But Katherine Johnson figured out how to finesse the racism that she faced. Her daughter recalled that the old adage of Black people having to be “twice as good to get half as much” and says that was certainly true in Katherine’s case. So, he wrote a course where she was the only student.ĬURWOOD: Of course, Katherine Johnson was a Black woman in the Southern United States during the Jim Crow era. And he said, and if that's what your job is going to be, I'm gonna see that you're prepared. But he never got to do what his passion was. He said, you'd make a good research mathematician, because that was his passion. And in those days, if you think about it, a lot of the teachers that were in our HBCUs, back in the 20s and 30s were very frustrated doctors and lawyers and people that could not get jobs, other than teaching other black children. MOORE: She actually had a professor in college, W. (Photo: NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Later on for graduate school she was hand-picked to be one of three students to de-segregate West Virginia University in 1939. So, we were all good in math, because we had fun from the beginning.ĬURWOOD: Katherine Johnson graduated high school at the age of 14, and enrolled at the historically Black university, West Virginia State College where her genius was recognized and nurtured.
#Katherine johnson nasa worker license
And she'd say, all right, who can add up the numbers on the license plate the fastest. And I can remember as a child, we would ride in the car because that's how you traveled. I counted the plates and the saucers and the steps to church. And that's how it started.ĬURWOOD: And Katherine Johnson passed down her fascination with numbers to her own children: My grandfather did not stop her or make her go home at four that the friend of the grandmother said, I think I need to start a kindergarten class, she needs to be in school.
She said my brother is having trouble with math in school, and I'm going to help him. MOORE: At four years old, she was walking up the street and said, well, where are you going, little girl. The story goes that her family was told by a neighbor that Katherine Moore told us her mother showed signs of being a math genius even before she had begun school – around the time when a young child might be picking up this very picture book and reading about Katherine’s Johnson’s life. For our live book club event we were joined by one of those daughters, Katherine Moore, named after her mother, who is also a coauthor of this picture book for children. Katherine Johnson passed away in February 2020, at the age of 101, leaving behind her pioneering legacy in astrophysics and three daughters. The film earned three Academy Award nominations and several dozen awards after its release in 2016, and Katherine started to write her own autobiography and memoir. TEACHER: In all my years of teaching, I’ve never seen a mind like the one your daughter has.ĬURWOOD: Hidden Figures tells the story of three Black female mathematicians – Katherine Johnson and her colleagues Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, and their lives as they worked as human computers at NASA during the Space Race. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty straightforward from there. So, if you move all the terms over to one side, you can put the quadratics into a form that can be factored, allowing that side of the equation to equal zero. YOUNG KATHERINE: If the product of two terms is zero, then common sense says at least one of the two terms has to be zero to start with. One scene shows her as a child prodigy amazing a teacher:
#Katherine johnson nasa worker movie
You may know that name as she was the NASA employee who did the hand calculations for many of America’s earliest manned space voyages and her story was featured in movie Hidden Figures. The Living on Earth Book Club recently looked at a graphic book for children called One Step Further: My Story of Math, the Moon, and a Lifelong Mission that tells the story of Katherine Johnson. CURWOOD: The compelling story of a mathematics genius who grew up as an African American girl during the era of Jim Crow shows the sky isn’t even the limit, when one considers outer space.